Pros
You can book your shifts on a weekly basis and they are very flexible. There is free tea and coffee and sometimes biscuits. You do not have to dress in business suits and there are computers you can use at break times to search the internet.
Cons
The pay is £7.30 an hour. If you are still there after three months, it goes up to between £8.50 an hour to £13 depending on what shifts you pick but many people are sacked before then. Moreover, the people on £7.30 an hour are encouraged to choose the evening and weekend shifts. These are the shifts that those who have passed their three month probation would be able to earn more than the weekday daytime rate of £8.50 an hour. You are offered six trial shifts and you have to pass them otherwise that is it. The weekday shifts are just over four hours in length and so it is the equivalent of being sacked after three days. A lot of people fail at this early stage. If you do pass congratulations! you are offered a further nine trial shifts and if you fail these... If you are one of the few who passes this trial period, you are on a three month probation period. Not everyone passes that probation period.. One person told me that out of the groups of 10 people who started on the same day as her at Go Gen, she was the only one who passed the three month probation. Practically everyone you speak to is on a trial shift. I didn't make it beyond the 15th shift but many of the people I started with did not make it past the first hurdle. The supervisors do not help to bring the best out of the new callers. Some of them can be quite unpleasant and you soon learn to ask the person next to you if you are not sure about a minor thing. I don't think they are trained in leadership. The ladies' toilets are often out of order and so you may have to use the one communal loo...the less said about that the better. Suffice it to say that many women drank as little as they could during their shifts at Go Gen. I once decided to wait until my shift finished, to use the loos at a nearby theatre. If you are coming in on a Sunday, bring a few hankies because they run out of loo paper. Booking shifts was a disorganised process. You would have to book your shifts for the next week on the Wednesday of the week you were in. However the shifts were confirmed on the Friday. Many of us found that we were only getting some of the shifts we had asked for. If you did not get all of the shifts you wanted, finding out on Friday makes it difficult for you to find alternative work elsewhere. Your co-workers are nice but this is not a happy working environment. People are worried about losing their jobs and you don't know when a supervisor is going to make a cutting comment. The pay of £7.30 is less than what many are paid in supermarkets and it is too low for what we put into every phone call.