Avantages
The opportunity to quit, or just read the reviews and never work here in the first place.
Inconvénients
Ultimate Staffing is a culture quite similar to what others describe in the staffing industry; cut throat, dog eat dog, and greedy. It's unfortunate that Marketing, Practice Managers, and Market Managers all attempt to portray how office and culture are not the aforementioned attributes, because they’re selling a lie. Upper level management makes a strong effort on Glassdoor to even out every negative review with one that boosts the company’s profile. Sad, but you can see it for yourself. In these offices, there is constant and underlying negative competition, where employees must perform with little resources, no development, and horrific training. It’s conflict driven. Most of my practical job training came from stumbling and making mistakes because I wasn’t trained, only to be told afterward by peers how a process works. In addition, there is much back stabbing between colleagues in attempts to achieve sales bonuses. I learned the hard way that leaders in the office are not developers of people, rather, they are driven by the culture of greed. Specifically, the team “Lead” title in the office means little more than someone who is expected to sell more than others…they will steal candidates, and clients from anyone in the office to try and hit another bonus. Watch out, Denver coworkers… In my first 4 weeks, I sat through pre-recorded online training videos, with no coaching, or development from my manager or team. These videos are verbose type marketing media, and offer no practical information. After the video training period, I expected to immediately hit unrealistic weekly sales metrics. You may wonder how a Business Solutions Manager hits these metrics truthfully between all you're given to do (more on work - life balance soon). The answer is that no one in the office achieves completely legitimate sales metrics, everyone lies. I came to learn that much sales activity is recorded that is not real sales activity, because there isn’t adequate time or resources given in order to meet legitimate metrics or quotas. You are expected to manage cold calling, sales appointments, recruiting, and administrative compliance quotas. It’s ridiculous, and unrealistic. Get ready for a lot of micromanagement, because you have no value outside the sales you bring in. Building your own client portfolio is utterly painful, as you have no real competitive advantage versus any other staffing company, and have no resources to help you look for new clients. Marketing tries its best to put forward a front, but there is nothing proprietary, or innovative in this industry, and especially not at Ultimate Staffing. The company pays big money to have them listed as a "top company" to work for in small, unknown online marketing “magazines” exist. Employees are fully aware of it, and openly mock the company. In company wide conference calls, this is touted as a badge of honor, as if it isn’t obvious to be a clearly paid marketing ploy. Do they really think us all that ignorant? The internal software is some of the worst you may ever use. Upper management isn’t aware of why there are so many bugs and problems. They also don’t fully know how to use the software, leaving you to learn things “as you go” because you don’t have another choice. It makes the daily processes you work in unbearably slow, with frequent system crashing on slow computers you wouldn’t ever voluntarily use. Nonetheless, you are expected to work through these issues and "suck it up." Some employees even create their own Excel sheets to try and build systems in the absence of company resources (time suck). No thanks, right? There are many companies that provide solid internal software and resources…just not Ultimate. Possibly one of the worst areas of the business is the (not so) clever marketing lie about work-life balance. Most branch level jobs are touted as “hourly,” however, logging any overtime hours is not permitted. I started to see a glaring problem when I noticed all my coworkers working from home, working through their lunches, working after hours, and working on weekends with only standard hours logged. The Practice Manager I worked under never took a lunch break, regularly working around the clock; 60+ hours per week (at least). It became very clear that you must work overtime to hit and maintain your sales metrics, but you couldn’t log that overtime. In fact, it’s well known at Ultimate Staffing that the standard work week hours you log will not be enough. Therefore, it’s expected of you to go in on your off days, work from home, work through lunch, take business calls after hours etc., and do it unpaid. It’s the nature of this culture. The real truth is that this is a salaried job with a strict weekly schedule, where you will be working unpaid overtime. In fact, I was told by the Team Lead that this job is expected to be treated like a sole proprietorship; you work like you’re running your own business, just without the rewards of actually owning your business. In the Lead's words, we are “thrown to the wolves, for better or worse…” Another practical, and serious drawback of Ultimate Staffing are the health benefits. When recruited to this job, health benefits were touted as top notch and generous. I made the mistake of trusting that to be true, and after reviewing benefits during my first week, I realized benefits cost just under $10k annually - incredibly ridiculous! In this day and age, benefits are certainly costly to employers, that’s understandable. However, Roth Staffing companies aren’t suffering financially with more than 600 employees nationally. Every company wide meeting I took part in trumpeted the new revenue records achieved across the country. Clearly, they elected not to create a reasonable benefits plan, when nearly $10k is taken from your annual paycheck before ever using the health plan. That’s just a fact, not an opinion. Others in my office equally and openly complained over the lack of quality benefits, with most declining coverage, or choosing to use their spouses more reasonable health plan. While I could probably go on about my experience, the main points here should suffice. This was the worst job and culture I ever experienced.
