Pros
-Full Time (good hours) -Benefits ( good medical, dental and vison but not much else) -Incentives (the incentives were pretty good when they followed through on what they promised) -People ( I had a really cool trainer, some pretty cool supervisors, and a few awesome co-workers. I got lucky with the supervisors because some of the others were hateful and thought they knew more than they did when most knew about as much and some even less than I did)
Cons
The job itself: I worked as an inbound technical support agent for Startek for one year. My overall experience was not very positive. The job itself was stressful and management made it even that much more stressful. Calls were always back-to-back (which I didn’t mind too much because I knew I was working at a call center) but if you auxed or went into after-call for even a few seconds managers would literally scream for you to auto-in. There were also times when they offered incentives that they did not follow through on. I can remember several times being offered incentives that were not followed through on…example: one evening they asked some of us to stay an extra hour to help meet their interval for the client, they offered us an additional $25. I never saw mine…There was also a time they offered us $10 for exceeding expectation for a certain metric…never saw that either …and these are just two examples of things that happened often. Schedules: When hired I was given a set schedule (mine did not include any weekends off but I knew that going in). However, we were told that if we worked hard enough and kept our metrics good enough we could earn a better schedule when shift bids came around. Wrong! Our team was ranked number one in the site and yet there were people with horrible metrics coming in after us and getting offered better schedules. The worst part is there wasn’t even a shift bid and no one in management told us about any better shifts being offered. We had to listen to people who came in after us and did not do as good a job as us tell us about the great shifts they had been offered and when we asked about it we were told that those people were not supposed to say anything (so the company/management knew what they were doing and intentionally tried to keep us from finding out that they were passing around better schedules to their favorites). When we finally did get a site wide shift bid they told us two weeks later that they had made a mistake and we had to do all over again. When we re-did the shift bid the new schedules being offered were horrible. Application/Interview process: The initial application process had entirely too many steps which could be streamlined into fewer steps and less commute. The process for me consisted of: Going to the facility having a face-to-face interview, then at a separate time coming back to the facility to do a computer competency test and a typing test (this was after the lengthy application which included similar tests). They could have factored the typing and computer competency tests into the application itself. At a completely separate time I was scheduled for a phone interview where I was just asked questions like did I have transportation and things that could have been asked during my face-to-face interview. The hiring process to move up once you’re in the company is not much better, in fact it may even be worse, because by this point you have been at the company working and trying to prove yourself to the higher-ups only to be forced to jump through more unnecessary hoops just to get one step above entry level. It has been over a year since I went through all of this, so I am having a bit of trouble recounting every detail piece by piece (but even that should speak volumes about their messed up hiring process…the fact that I can’t even remember all the people and “lost” applications I had to go through), but what I do remember is that I went through every bit of eight people, three applications that somehow got “lost” going from person to person, and two interviews with two different people in the exact same position, all just to end up with nothing and when I say I ended up with nothing I don’t mean I was turned down for the job. That would have been so much better actually. It would have been much better if they had told me “At this time we do not think you are the right fit for the position”. Rather than turn me down I was told repeatedly by multiple people how good I was at my current job and what a great asset I would be to the company in a higher position. I was even told what steps they would take to move me along in the hiring process…only for none of it to ever happen and me to feel like I was being a nuisance by continuing to ask. When I finally was able to get some information I was told they were no longer hiring for that position. While I was being told how great I was yet still being made to jump through hoops to get promoted, other people (some of which came in after me-with no more experience than I had) were moving right along in the process and getting the position. The position in fact did open up again and when I asked about FINALLY getting somewhere in this twisted hiring process I was told that I needed to fill out yet ANOTHER application in order for them to get, and I quote, a “fresh perspective” …I quit that day. I have worked another call center job since leaving Startek and I must say that Startek doesn't even compare in pay, benefits, work-life balance, hiring process, or really anything at all. I met some nice people at Startek but I still wouldn't recommend it to anyone.