DO NOT work here if you can avoid it - Anonymous employee Grill'd Employee Review

Pretty much everything. When I started I was 18 and got $13 an hour. There is no overtime, no public holiday rates and no weekend rate. I worked every single public holiday in my first year, including Christmas Eve where I was rostered on until midnight, but had to stay back because we ran behind, so technically worked Christmas Day on $13 an hour. Grill’d was taken to court in my second year of employment and my pay went up to $14. The reason they get away with low pay is because they hire you as an apprentice and say that they’ll train you in your Cert 3 in Hospitality. That never happens, and everyone in my store asked numerous times to get certified but the manager kept putting it off. Also made it hard to get qualified as the company doing the “training” went bankrupt. The founder and CEO of Grill’d, Simon Crowe, once described the apprenticeship as being a course on the “art of burger making”, yet the majority of the team leaders never completed the course either. It’s just a scam to pay staff less and they rely on a frequent turn over of employees. Whenever anyone had complaints about the way the store was being run (bullying from manager, homophobia from assistant manager, dirty store etc.), complaints were never progressed by HR. It made it especially hard to complain about a managers behaviour when often the area manager or state manager would just pass the information back to the person that had a complaint made about them. One time when I was working, the store caught on fire because the vents above the open grill were never cleaned. A month prior to this, a store just a suburb away had completely burned down from the same issue. After the team working evacuated all the customers, we put out the fire and called the manager. He drove from the other side of the city drunk and offered us all a free drink from the fridge to thank us for our hard work. The next day, I had an open shift and had to sit there for two hours, refusing to work, because the manager hadn’t installed new fire extinguishers and hadn’t had the vents changed. To clarify, this wasn’t just my store. In fact, my store was better than others because it was company owned and not a franchise. To give you an idea of the franchises, once an assistant manager from the Yarraville store tried to sell me heroin that he’d stashed up his bum at New Guernica, and then told me that my pay per hour was much better than what he was paying his staff.