Pros
I have fond memories of Christmas parties, managers away days, long service awards and summer barbecues when we had them. The geographical reach of ICS was always a plus which meant service to candidates and clients was simple and effective. While I didn't enjoy the training sessions as I felt they were outdated, meeting up with people from other offices was a good to share best practise. On a personal level I grew fond of many people there including my first director and the CEO, Richard. There is career progression but it's quite unavailing.
Cons
I worked my way up through Pulse over the course of 8 years. I worked hard every day because I wanted to grow the ladder, lead a team, earn more money and become pivotal in future plans for the company. What was once a vibrant, personable company eventually turned into a monster, hell bent on making money at almost any cost. When the agency caps hit, my positive career was immediately called into question and I was made to feel like I became bad at my job over night. I worked 10-12 hour days without any thanks. As I grew the ladder I realised that 'progression' was a myth; in fact, what happened was my base was partially increased inline with the increased responsibility however the way the commission structure is arranged meant my consultants were taking home more than me. I worked hard to get to management level but all it meant was endless meetings, I even had one meeting to discuss what we were going to discuss at a future meeting. My experience of career progression was accumulating other people's problem areas and being tasked to fix them - more career accumulation as opposed to progression methinks. The role felt like groundhog day as instead of head hunting, placing candidates and forming effective collaborative relationships I was measured on the productivity of my team and had to count the number of phone calls they made and outbound duration of calls vs duration inbound. I grew tired of this ineffective approach to recruitment and moved on. I worked for a couple of divisions and sadly, from my experience, the approach is the same - tired and ineffective. It's of no surprise to me that ICS are investing more in life sciences because while I'm sure they still make a lot of money in nursing, they are no longer regarded as the significant market leaders they once were due to the arrogant decision not meet cap rates as they thought they were irreplaceable within the NHS in 2016 where they lost significant market share.