Pros
There are talented people across Gerber, and I worked with many individuals I genuinely respected. The business is complex, fast-moving, and gives you exposure to a wide range of HR issues, especially if you are in a corporate or field-support role. For someone looking to build experience in a large, multi-state organization, there is definitely valuable work to be done. The company also has enough scale that you can learn a lot quickly. You are exposed to employee relations, operations, recruiting, leadership dynamics, compliance issues, change management, and the realities of supporting a large workforce. That part of the experience was meaningful, and I do not want to minimize the people who are doing good work every day under difficult circumstances. The problem is that the good people and the valuable experience do not cancel out the leadership issues. In some ways, they make those issues more frustrating because the company has enough talent to be much better than it is.
Cons
The biggest con is the gap between what the company says about people and how it actually treats high performers behind closed doors. In my experience, Gerber knows how to squeeze every ounce of effort out of someone and then call it opportunity. Long days become normal. Extra work becomes expected. Strong performance becomes a reason to pile on more, not a reason to promote or properly compensate someone. The recognition culture also wore thin fast. At first, the praise feels good. Then you realize praise is often the substitute for real investment. Awards, compliments, and positive reviews do not make up for being passed over, under-leveled, underpaid, or taken for granted. The HR culture was especially disappointing. It felt political, transactional, and exhausting. People were valued when they were useful, quiet, and willing to keep absorbing more. But if you started questioning the pattern, the tone changed. That is not leadership. That is control dressed up as culture. For an HR organization, the lack of self-awareness was honestly stunning. HR should be modeling trust, fairness, accountability, and healthy leadership. Instead, my experience was that HR was one of the clearest examples of the very issues the company should have been addressing.
