Pros
-Large company with strong history and strong brands within "necessities" categories -Good growth opportunities, if you fit the culture and have the right personality type -Good shorter run (2-3 years) company for building early resume and experience -Fair pay, good benefits -Good people
Cons
-Company is very process oriented and work standardization focused. Most of your tactical work will follow some kind of standard process that has checkpoint forms to complete on top of the task itself. While this benefits, for example, a new college graduate that is learning the basics, it can become time consuming, monotonous, robotic, etc. the more experience you have. Processes and work standardization prevent the company from being as agile and adaptable as it could be. Company is much more reactive culturally and it can take considerable time (years) to adapt to new ways of thinking and working. The company is also not very innovative and is more reserved/conservative in what they will invest in. Strategies are often recycled from previous years. Cyclical restructuring and cost cutting tend to be primary strategic vehicles as opposed to true innovation. If you value a certain degree of "work freedom", enjoy using experience based instincts, like the ability to work outside of processes, or don't like to feel micromanaged by processes, you will most likely be happier with another organization. -Company is also very meeting structured. On average, you will spend half of your work week preparing for, attending, or reacting to a meeting. Meetings can be redundant and. at times are a hindrance to your day to day tactical work. If you enjoy this type of structure, you will be fine. If you value more ad hoc problem solving, off the cuff team dynamics, less structured/white space friendly environments, you will likely be happier with another organization. -Company has a ton of turnover and leadership constantly pushes that "they need talent" or "are talent short". Internally, the company will move people into new roles regularly. While this is good for individual experience and exposure, employees are so time crunched from meetings and processes that training suffers. A lot of folks don't stay in a role long enough or have the white space to become a functional expert. You also do spend a bit of cyclical time bringing new team members up to speed on basics. The culture basically creates an environment where you'll learn to do quite a few basic things decently but the flip side to the coin is, you'll need to use off work time to learn and absorb how to do things great. Folks hired from outside have a hard time adapting to all the process work and lack of white space and often leave after a year or two. In fairness, there are quite a few employees that started with and stayed with the company for the long run. If it's the only culture you know or if you like a lot of structure and process, you'll enjoy the company. Lastly, if you value feeling like you're caught up on things at the end of the average day, this company is not going to be a good fit for you. -Upper management at times is oblivious to tactical, day to day white space needs and can't seem to connect the dots between the burying culture of meetings/process work and the continued talent gap. -Software systems are inefficient, inflexible, and numerous. -Culture of moving people around frequently has created a lot of middle management roles and specialty teams. Good for the long run career opportunities but causes simple tasks to require multiple communication channels, red tape, unneeded processes, and delays in decision making. What takes a day to get approved in most organizations can take weeks with KC -Again, it is a good company but it's simply not for everyone. I'd recommend knowing your work and management style(s) well (what you find motivating, demotivating, etc.) before going to work at KC.