Cartus Reviews

Pros

Room for progression; ethical and care about its employees

Cons

Not very innovative, stuck in the 2000's

Pros

Reasonable pay and they try with staff benefits - like free fruit each month. Team I worked with was supportivr

Cons

Very stressful, long hours as it's an international company, little management support, very corporate culture, not really personal.

Pros

Great colleagues around you Good social events

Cons

Under staffed = high workloads Poor progression

Pros

Good atmosphere among the consultants most of the time despite the pressure on them. Free tea, coffee or hot chocolate. Just go easy on the milk or you might be called out on it. Not joking. Free parking at the Swindon office. Sadly that's probably it.

Cons

In my opinion: Very poor pay. I know it is Swindon and the relocation industry has very fine margins, but the pressure and expectations put on most consultants is not at all commensurate to the pay. 9am to 5:15pm are the standard working hours. The extra 15 minutes everyday is also questionable. High volume caseloads. Expect anywhere between 80-180 active cases usually the higher end. Also, if your colleagues... are off sick, you are expected to cover for them. I.e. prioritise their caseload at the expense of yours. Basically just get on with it. Some teams play out a team delegation exercise, others employ a 'buddy' system, and we all know, if your 'buddy' isn't very organised, it can be a complete disaster. The unofficial Cartus saying between colleagues is "it is what it is". Also, this high volume caseload has a detrimental effect on the service that consultants can give individually to each assignee, which in turn frustrates the assignee's. Terrible staff retention rate. There are new staff all the time. I rarely see consultants stay at Cartus for more then a few years at most. Reasoning, well instead of paying staff decent wages, or giving decent pay rises, they seem to accept losing the experienced consultants and hiring new consultants, paying the recruitment company and then spending money internally to train them up, and the cycle repeats. This makes no sense! Poor progression & development. An emphasis is put on self development internally and there is an attempt by the business to provide this, however, with the volume demands of most consultants, there simply is not the time to do learn and develop. You have to ensure that you are extremely proactive when it comes to your caseload and take a strong approach with your manager that you are making time for this development regardless of their opinion. Poor maternity options, so I constantly hear. Poor training overall. Not the fault of the L&D team, just very limited and the expectation is to get to work immediately and in effect learn on the job, which has been disastrous for some new hires. The old tech systems don't help either. A new system has been in the pipework for years but never seems to get implemented. Management makes little effort to reward the positives. But makes every effort to highlight the negatives. If something goes wrong regardless of fault, forget any good that you've done over the years, it literally is forgotten. Unofficially it has often felt that you are expected to work beyond your contracted hours but when you do, don't expect any recognition and certainly no additional pay. Heaven forbid you start putting away your pens/paper in your draw 'seconds' before you're due to leave for the day. Trust me it will be noticed and called out on in your 1-2-1 and the bitterness that it creates internally is completely unnecessary, I've seen it with many colleagues sadly, even top performers. There's a blame culture mixed with unnecessary micromanagement.

Advice to Management

Improve pay across the board. Standard pay for a new hire consultant in Swindon should be £25,000 for the workload you expect to be handled. At present it's between £20,000-£22,000. At least offer decent performance incentives/bonuses. Hire more staff. Listen to your employees. Reward the positives more! Be more flexible with staff. Most have families, kids etc and the stress that comes with that. Then on top... of it, they are given caseloads which reasonably should be 50% less then they are. I seriously had concerns for some staff members mental health at times, especially during the busy summer months.

Pros

Not very busy so spend a lot of time tidying up processes

Cons

Not a single person is happy working there. Partly because the money is poor but also the management don’t treat you very well. As soon as I got pregnant management weren’t interested, treated me poorly which resulted in me not returning after maternity leave

Advice to Management

Be a manager regardless of pregnancy!

Pros

Really good training in Swindon and many career opportunities in Swindon, not as many opportunities in London.

Cons

Not the highest salary maybe

Pros

the pay is ok I guess.

Cons

on team training is awful, expected to know everything right away. no one to ask for help, unsupportive managers. I also had the worst interview for this job where I was made to feel incapable of the role, surprised I got it and should have taken this as a warning sign.

Advice to Management

train people for the teams they are going into or tell managers what you are being trained on...

Pros

none asolutely nothing good to say

Cons

stressfull little training youre expected to have no life

Advice to Management

treat your employees like human beings