Not for me - Associate Consultant Hays Employee Review

I joined Hays as an experienced consultant who had previously a successful contact desk billing over 250k a year. The interview process was like the xfactor but was relatively ok. When I started we were told how lucky we were to have secured a place at Hays and that many other consultants across the country would dream to be in our position. Thought that was a little odd and this really was what most employees at the office believed, that they were inferior to others in the industry. We were set unrealistic and unachievable targets which we had to present the outcome off to the rest of the new starters, HR and the MD. As an experienced consultant I put a lot of pressure on myself to achieve these however when I didn’t and was faced with telling the MD, HR and the other new starters it really dented my confidence as failing to hit KPIs wasn’t something I was used to. However during the presentation it very quickly became clear that none of the other 10 new starters had hit their targets either and after speaking with other colleagues I found out that most people didn’t even come close to hitting their targets either when they started. It seems a strange process to put new starters through and certainly caused a lot of us undue stress. I do wonder why Hays haven’t looked at this and changed it as it was clear the targets were unachievable which was proved by not one person hitting them. I guess this would be a fair reflection of how the company is run, out of date and corporate. There was little training on the industry of your desk, I wasn’t trained on payroll despite having 5 people out working for me and the CRM system is hard to use, slow and isn’t fit for purpose. Consultants also don’t have their own numbers which is bizarre, there is an office number which one of 35+ people could answer. I left after 4 months and am now much happier, even if I was ‘lucky’ to have secured the opportunity there.