Vantaggi
It's nice that most locations are set up the same way. Clients appreciate being able to walk in and know what to expect. There are several services and retail items offered. In-salon continuing education is offered periodically. It did take me a little while to adjust to taking walk-in clients only. I had worked in three salons prior to SmartStyle. All previous salons accepted walk-ins, but only if we were not already booked with scheduled appointments. The interview process was quite easy. I only had to answer the usual general interview questions and I also had to bring in a hair model and perform a haircut on them while the manager looked on and took notes.
Svantaggi
Most employees, including myself, were constantly being scheduled to work sometimes up to 11 days straight without a break. Weekends, opening, and closing shifts were supposed to be rotated equally between all employees. I was constantly having to work closing shifts on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. Often 3-4 weeks in a row. There were 14 of us working there at the time so this should never have happened. It was almost nearly impossible to take more than 3 days off in a row. If you were approved to take three days off, you were required to work four 10hr shifts up until your days off and another set of four 10hr shifts as soon as you got back. When my manager (whom I had always gotten along with) went on vacation for two weeks, she put me in charge. She told everyone else that I was in charge and to call me if they had any problems. If it was anything serious, I was to give her a call. For some reason, unknown to me, the manager had gone behind my back and told another employee that she was in charge. At the time, I had about 6 years experience and had worked at a few other salons. This other employee only had about 6 months experience. This was her first job as a cosmetologist and she was very unprofessional and the quality of her work was very poor. Soon, nearly every employee was either calling the manager before talking to me, or was calling this other employee. When the manager came back from vacation, she put in her two weeks notice. Two of my coworkers applied for the manager's position. (One of them being the girl with only 6 months experience.) The other girl that applied had more experience than her and was definitely better suited for the job. The district leader was to interview both applicants. The girl who undoubtedly should've gotten the job didn't even get an interview. They just called the inexperienced one and offered her the job. In my past experience working for Regis, I can say this didn't surprise me, unfortunately. Being only 4 hours from their headquarters, we'd get visited by the higher-ups fairly frequently. They were all caddy, giggly, unprofessional nitwits. The former district leader even told us that we were using too many sticks to wax and that we should just double dip in order to save the company money. (Of course we didn't follow that advice.) You could call leaders to address issues and nothing would ever be resolved. Even if there was a complaint from a client that they were supposed to address, they would never call the client back. Which, of course meant the client would blame everything on us personally and would put us all in a very awkward position. Basically, after working for a Regis salon in the past, i was a bit weary of working for another one of their salons. After working at SmartStyle, I can definitely say I would never EVER work for this company again.