Pros
While working at TEK was mostly a negative experience, there were a few positives... 1. The training program is well put together. Since everyone who joins the company starts as an IT Recruiter, they make sure you know the ins and outs of the job completely. They'll fly you to either Hanover, MD, Phoenix, AZ, or Dallas, TX anywhere from your 6th-9th week on the job. You'll be out there for a week in really collaborative classes learning everything about the job. They also have a training/continuous education software called "Degreed" which is helpful during training and even afterwards. 2. Solid base salary for a recruiter - I'll get more into the details of compensation later in the cons, but a base salary of $50,000/year is among the highest in the industry... but as I said, there's a reason for that, and I'll touch on it later. 3. Every meal/happy hour/trip you go on with a client or with the company will be expensed, which is always nice. 4. If you hit "contest," it means that you have maintained $12,000 in spread (how much money you make the company per week). If you maintain 12,000 in spread throughout the entire year, the company will send you to Playa Del Carmen for a few days, fully expensed, then your second time hitting "contest" they'll send you to Cancun. They'll also give you a $12,000 check when you hit contest. It's cool, but personally, I'd rather get a bigger paycheck instead of a trip. 4. If you hit contest you get stock that pays out dividends every year and then pays out the value of the stock at 5 years. This perk is essentially just golden handcuffs, but for the people that stay and succeed in this job, the payouts are pretty nice. But seeing as the average tenure of an employee at TEK is maybe a little over a year or two, most will never see this perk. 5. You are paid weekly, which is nice.
Cons
Where do I even begin honestly... This company has some major issues, from the corporate level all the way to the office level. Here are the main ones that stood out to me in my tenure there. 1. This is a SALES job, and a grueling one with that. I would be as bold to say all recruiting firms are almost identical, minus a few minor details. You are expected to be on the phone for 4-5 hours a day talking to people and trying to fill job reqs that you have been given with the people you're calling. You're expected to have at least 5 lengthy discussions with people everyday, go to lunch with at least one consultant each day, etc. They hold you to high standards there, and if you don't meet those initial numbers, you will be micromanaged until you do. And even when you do hit them, you will still be micromanaged unless you are a very tenured recruiter. I was one of the top recruiters in the office and was constantly being micromanaged because I wasn't hitting exact numbers when it came to meeting consultants, even though I was still putting butts in seats. Don't accept a job with TEK if you are expecting the people who hired you to trust you enough to let you do your job without looking over your shoulder the entire time you're trying to do it. There is little to no trust, which is why micromanaging happens. 2. The compensation structure is absolutely laughable. I would tell my friends about the way the compensation was structured and they'd ask me if I was a part of a Ponzi Scheme. This is how it works... When you're hired, you are given a training salary, $12.25/hour. You will earn that same hourly rate until you make it over $3,000 in spread. You get a certain amount of spread for each consultant you get a job. You need roughly 3-5 consultants to accept and work at a job in order to get to 3,000 in spread. Once you make it to 3,000 in spread, then you start making $50,000 base salary. You then have to make it to 8,000 spread to start making commission. Commissions are awful. For every thousand dollars in spread you go up, you'll make $50 more in your paycheck, that's before it's taxed of course. So when you hit 9,000 in spread you'll be given an extra $50 in your paycheck every week, 10,000 you'll be given $100 and so on. But then you think, "Wait... If I'm making the company $9,000 a week, and I'm only making $50 in weekly commissions, yet I'm making the company $468,000 a year. MY COMMISSIONS ARE ONLY .0001% OF THE MONEY I'M MAKING THE COMPANY?" Yes, yes they are. You, my friend, are making all of the managers and execs in the company a whole lot of money, but you are not making anything. Also, everyone who is thinking about working at TEKsystems needs to know that this is NOT an internal recruiting job. You are not recruiting people to work for TEKsystems, you are recruiting people to work as a contracted consultant at other companies. Places like Apple, Whole Foods, Amazon, etc do this religiously. Why would a place like Apple or Amazon hire a software developer directly when they will have just as much success and pay far less hiring someone on a 6 month contract to do the job? That's where the recruiters and account managers come into play. You might be thinking as you're reading this, "Oh, this sounds easy, just find people jobs that they love!" Not so fast, my friend (As Lee Corso would say). Yea, you find people jobs at places like Apple and Amazon, and you get "spread" when you place them there, but these people are usually only working on a 6-month contract at these places, and when they leave, you lose the money you were making on them. And that's the best case scenario! A lot of times consultants you place get fired, they frequently take other full-time job offers without even telling you, or a company you place them at loses funding and then the contractors are laid off, ect. This makes it EXTREMELY hard to sustain any sort of success. This is why the compensation is a total mess here, which leads me to... 3. Career Advancement- Also absolutely terrible. At TEKsystems when you are a recruiter and you are doing well, and you think to yourself, "Hmm, I'm doing well at recruiting, I want to ask my manager what the next step in my career at TEKsystems is!" Your manager will give you two options, become an account manager, or become a recruiting lead (the same exact job as a recruiter, but the compensation is a tad better). So, if you're picking up what I'm putting down, EVERY person that joins TEKsystems has to start as a recruiter, and if your desire is to stay in recruiting, you can become a recruiting lead and you'll be stuck in that position forever, so your only other choice is account management! If you ever want to move into management, you honestly only have one choice, account management, which is still sales, but instead of placing people in a job, you're meeting hiring managers of different companies an trying to convince them that TEK can fill their business. If you ever desire to be in a position that isn't recruiting or account management, good luck. On average you'll have to wait around 7-8 years before being trusted with any position above that. In the meantime, management might encourage you to take a lateral move as a "stretch" assignment, to grow your skill set, which is totally bogus. The career progression is as linear as it could possibly get, and it still hasn't occurred to management and the execs of the company that most people don't want to recruit or become an account manager, instead, they'd like to see other career paths in the company. This is only part of the issue with the career progression. Let's say that you are knocking recruiting out of the park and really want to go into account management. It is completely up to your DBO (office manager) to promote you, which makes things incredibly political. I've seen situations where someone is at 19,000 in spread and another person is at 8,000 in spread and the 8,000 person is promoted over the 19,000 person because the DBO likes that employee more. Promotions aren't based on objective numbers (even though they tell you they are.) Promotions are based on popularity contests which is ridiculous. 4. Work/Life Balance- In my office, we were required to be in the office no later than 7:45 am, and were expected to stay until at least 5:30pm. Our DBO would be very disturbed if he walked out into the "pit" (main part of the office, where the recruiters sit) at 5:00pm and people weren't sitting there still on the phone. We were told by our DBO, "Come on people, this is an agile work environment! I shouldn't see people leaving at 5:00!" Two things are unfortunate about this. Number one, my DBO has no idea what "agile environment" means, and number two, this leads to SEVERE burnout. When I say severe, I mean it. There is a reason that attrition is so high in this company (It has reached over 100% in some offices). Your time will not be respected at work or when you go home. You'll be required to go to after-wok happy hours, and will be contacted by account managers asking you to work from home after work. There is little to no respect for work/life balance. 5. Culture- This is your quintessential company that will put their values on a website or on the wall in the office and NEVER talk about them again. TEKsystem's culture is pretty awful. TEKsystems and other recruiting agencies specifically target colleges when it comes to recruiting their IT recruiters. Because of this, every office is full of a bunch of 24-30 year old fraternity or sorority members that are wildly immature. Not to mention that since the company is headquartered in Maryland, you inevitably get a bunch of "Wolf on Wall Street wannabe's" from the northeast in every office. I wish I were kidding when I say that the people from the northeast in my office had an unbelievable lack of social awareness and patience, and were incredibly hard to work with, more so than the fraternity and sorority people from the south. Although I'm being somewhat humorous in this post, I'm certainly not joking. The offices truly are full of a bunch of immature recent grads attempting to lead and guide other immature recent grads. The DBO and other leaders in my office were older, but still wildly immature and stuck in their ways. I'm not kidding when I say that my "agile" DBO had daily stand-up meetings in the morning that lasted for an hour... truly "agile methodologies" at their finest. In summary, the trends I see in not just my office, but all offices are - Unintelligent, selfish, slimy young people doing whatever they can to make an extra buck, even at the expense of others. 6. Benefits are meh. We are given decent PTO, I think it's about 20 days, you have to accrue the hours though. I think you can carry over 60 hours into the next year. 401k is awful, a $750 match, that's it. Health benefits aren't awful, but they certainly aren't great. 7. Different base salaries for different markets. The higher ups in the company desperately need to do their homework. Obviously, base salaries should fluctuate based on cost of living in different areas of the country. In some areas, TEK is good about that, and in others they are horrible. There is no reason whatsoever that recruiters in Rogers, Arkansas or even Fort Worth, Texas should be making the same base salary as a recruiter in Austin, TX. The execs need to do their homework, the cost of living isn't even remotely close. I hope you enjoyed the most thorough review you've ever read.
