Lovely people, but poor management, poor pay and slow to change
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.
