I would never recommend this job to anyone I care about.
I have never been so unhappy and disappointed with a job until I took this one at Citizens Bank. This job is at a retail branch. The effectiveness of your branch manager as a leader and the personalities of your colleagues have a major impact on your success and contentment with the job.
I never write reviews but this time I felt the need to because I feel that job applicants are grossly misled when told about this job.
First thing, THERE IS TOO MUCH PRESSURE TO DO TOO MUCH. You have to be both a bank employee and an investment employee. And you are not properly trained to do your job correctly.
Also, if you took this job because you want to learn how to invest or because you want to be a financial advisor one day, then you will be very disappointed that only 25% of your time will relate to anything that has to do with investing. The other 75% of the time will involve dealing with bank customers who have issues with their bank accounts or other bank products.
There is a lot of pressure to sell, sell, and sell even though the bank wants to make you believe that your job is customer service.
The compensation structure is VERY confusing and complex. You have to go through all sorts of hoops to earn your bonus. And your bonus depends on the performance of all your colleagues, not just your own efforts.
You are required to take multiple online courses for compliance reasons and the branch is supposed to give you time during your scheduled work hours to complete this requirement. HOWEVER, in a poorly managed branch, you are not given the time to take your required education because you are pushed to take a customer if there is a customer waiting. In addition, as an employee of both the bank and the investment side, you have DOUBLE the amount of required courses to complete compared to your colleagues. This results in you struggling to be in compliance and most times you have to complete the courses on your own time but you don’t get paid for that. The courses can take from 20 minutes to over an hour and you have to pass an assessment exam on some of them. If you are taking 6 or 7 courses a month and it takes you about 4 – 5 hours to complete all of them, and if your pay rate is $22/hr, then that equates to between $130 - $150 which you are not being paid a month. Over a year, that could mean $1,600 - $1,800 in wages that you were supposed to be paid but didn’t receive.
Also, you don’t get paid for all the time that you work. For instance, if a customer comes in with an issue and the issue requires you to work past the time that you were scheduled to work that day, you don’t get paid for the extra time that you had to work with the customer because branch managers do not like to pay over-time since over-time pay cuts into the branch's profits that branch managers show to their bosses.
The branches are always short staffed but yet branch managers still don’t like to have employees work over-time and get paid over-time.
You have to enter in the hours worked weekly. If you forget, you don’t get paid.
Branch managers seem to not be trained properly to be branch managers. They are so focused on sales because branch managers get hefty bonuses if their branch meets certain sales goals. This means that many things that shouldn’t be done are done to get the sale.
The banker training is disastrous, severely inferior, and severely inconsistent. If you ask three different people what is the procedure to perform a certain bank operation, you will get three different answers even though only one answer can be right. Even the staff answering the colleague help line is poorly trained and will give you the wrong answer on how to deal with an issue so there is very little support on how to properly do your job at the bank.
Equipment, technology are outdated. Bank system is slow and computer freezes frequently.
Branch is dirty. Furniture is embarrassing, broken, dirty.
About the benefits offered, they are not what they seem.
You have to PAY for your health insurance. It is NOT included as a benefit contrary to what the bank wants you to believe. Also, your prescriptions must be ordered by a mail service for the most part. Depending on the type of health insurance plan you pick, this could mean you are paying around $200 a month for your health insurance. So when you factor in this expense against your annual earnings, you are making $2400 less a year.
You can only take your PTO if your requested days are approved by the branch manager. At the end of the year, even if you have requested your PTO days but the branch manager cannot schedule your time off because of short staffing, then you LOSE your PTO days which you worked hard to earn. This has got to be some sort of Department of Labor violation but the bank doesn’t seem to care.
Work/Life balance? How is that possible when you can only get time off if your branch manager allows it? Plus, depending on your branch, your schedule does not stay the same and you don't find out your schedule for the upcoming week until the very last minute so you can’t plan out your life outside of work.
I have brought all these issues up to my branch manager and each time I am told that things will get better. But truth is, they don’t get better. You just deal with the way things are or you find a new job. There are reasons why licensed bankers leave after a few months. Just think about that.
