Absolute worst job I ever had (and I cleaned toilets). - Recensione dipendente - Administrator presso Hays

Firstly, many employees are encouraged to write reviews on GlassDoor, so many positive reviews here have been 'curated' by upper management. The pay is terrible. The only redeeming feature of the pay is that interns/apprentices are paid national minimum wage as opposed to the apprentice minimum wage. However for everyone else the pay is very bad. The basic salary is very low, the commission structure is not generous at all. The only chance of earning decent money (relative to the huge amount of hours required from you) is if you work there for years and get promoted lots of times and decide to people manage. People would boast about earning lots of money and commission, but they were very quiet about the 12-15+ hours of work a day they were doing and the constant heckling and threats of disciplinary action from upper management. and some people would even work on weekends (when we were officially closed). The company hires people at very low base salaries with grand promises of uncapped commission and promotion opportunities but other companies do the same and offer better starting packages, so the reality is they just want cheap labour. Directors are just horrible, horrible self absorbed people. Have absolutely no respect or admiration for other staff and back office staff just may as well not exist. It couldn't have been made clearer to me that my role was unimportant to the company and my manager had to fight to keep me as only my immediate team saw the importance of my role. I was often asked to do menial tasks completely unrelated to my role that were very belittling and patronising. My director in particular would have me or the receptionist act as her personal assistants a lot of the time simply because we were obviously on the lowest rung of the ladder in her eyes. Promotions are handled based on sales stats, so you often have people with no social, management or people skills whatsoever managing entire teams. Morale is always extremely low because upper management care too much about KPIs which are useless, leading staff to feel pressured pretty much all the time. They had no understanding of each employees individual skills and ability to perform their role. Instead, it was a one-size-fits-all approach as everyone must follow the same KPIs, do the same things regardless of if it works for them or not. If you are back office staff, you are constantly made to feel worthless as you don't get to partake in any of the events arranged for consultants. Consultants might have the money stat in their name but the company doesn't understand at all the role that back office staff have in acquiring that money from creating job adverts, calling candidates, forging relationships, huge amounts of admin, compliance duties etc. All unappreciated and ignored by anybody who matters in the company, who all fail to see the sheer amount of work we saved the consultants from doing. I was friendly with other back office staff from my office and others in the region and they all felt the same. The turnover of my office was incredible, we had people leaving weekly at one point. You would only just learn someones name before they were fired/left because they hated the job (or their manager). Though many of the people I was friends with were nice, the place breeds horrible attitudes in people who are promoted to management positions. My manager and one other were the only nice ones I ever met. For everyone else they are encouraged to push their team constantly, breathing down their necks, constant progress tracking, stat tracking, KPIs KPIs KPIs non stop. The hours for me were very long (9 hours a day) but for consultants it was even worse and people in my team would often arrive before 7am and not leave until 9 or 10pm. Though I didn't earn commission, from what I understood the structure was awful and Hays is one of the few recruitment companies that maintains a standard requirement before you are allowed to earn any commission at all. They like to change the goalposts a lot with regards to promotions and I had colleagues who were denied promotions despite having met the requirements. The funniest thing is that they publish pay guides indicating how much any role in any industry gets paid on average and Hays pay scheme was below the average of pretty much every position in their own published pay guide. There is quite a lot of backstabbing, betrayal, drama, office politics as people are seriously determined to make money and will often tread over anyone to get what they want. There were many occasions where colleagues of mine would receive angry aggressive phone calls from people in other offices accusing them of overstepping their 'territory' or sabotaging their own work somehow. There were also at times very unethical/immoral practices as the company encourages consultants to get money in any way possible. Customer service is not a priority (only when it affects money is it considered).