Charles Schwab reviews

Promotions hard to come by, it can be slow moving due to a consensus oriented culture, there are still a lot of underperforming individuals despite the many rounds of layoffs in earlier years. The move to other locations out of san francisco is causing a lot of heartburn among affected employee groups.

The way employees (at least in the service centers) are ranked for promotions, raises, etc is not the greatest system, and often times leaves talented people left behind. The system rewards those who can manipulate it successfully. For example client surveys account for about 25% of your bonuses compensation and indirectly your ability for promotions. Surveys are disproportional weighted, so if you get one non-perfect survey it can have a major adverse affect on where you stand with in the ranking system for bonuses and promotions. Also management has a real hard time throwing out bad surveys that reps did nothing to deserve. In other words senior management doesn’t have your back. And there are those who manipulate the system. A survey is generated on almost every inbound call, if you remain on the line and let the customer hang up before you, no survey is generated. Therefore, what you find is that reps who are highly ranked in surveys have very few of them, because they are not allowing clients to take the survey and manipulating the system, and unfortunate they are rewarded for doing so. Also in my experience our FC's (financial consultants) in our branch network are not the brightest bunch. For example I had an FC call and ask me how to figure interest due on a CD at maturity. I mean for crying out loud a sixth grader could figure that. The training is not the greatest either. There is very little in the way of training brokers to be brokers. If you want to be successful and knowledgeable you have to do the homework on your own.