Costello Medical reviews

- I would have said a pro, is the pay as it is good, however, for the amount of extra unpaid hours you are expected to do the pay isn't good and in my eyes not worth it. - Very long hours, from my first week at Costello I can't recall a time where I started and finished in my contracted hours. In my second week, I was pushed into a huge project and worked 10 hours over my contracted hours, with the promise 'it will be remembered, and you'll be given a voucher or time back to say thank you ' I never received said voucher or time back. - Work-life balance does not exist, pressure is pushed down from the senior team to stay until a job is finished. The teams are so understaffed that you are overworked every week with too many projects to juggle, so there is no choice you have to work over your contracted hours every day. If you speak up or say you have something planned you are made to feel like you are not a team player that you're letting the team down and that you aren't part of the 'family/Costello way of working'. This or you'll be told it will be fixed next week or they'll look into the workload (Which never happens). I would generally start at 7 am-6 pm and then travel home working another two hours at least at home, I found this to be a pattern with everyone around me too, you'll soon see that everyone around you is exhausted or constantly unwell. - Training/onboarding is terrible I was never properly shown around the office (this may be because I joined in covid times) but once everyone was back in the office I was still not shown things that I should have. In fact, when in the office I felt very uncomfortable example being I would put my coat on the back of my chair (a normal thing to do) later a Teams message would go out saying how bad this looked for clients visiting, and that people needed to put them in the cloakroom which I didn't know even existed it just made people feel uncomfortable and everything would be passed to your manager rather than someone just mentioning to you directly. The training was watching loads of videos that were so irrelevant and unhelpful to my role, being told by my manager to skip through them as quickly as possible (red flag) so I could start on work. - Something I wish I had looked into more was why are they hiring for so many roles. My team even now has had a job advertised the entire time I was there and still do +8 more, I was told it's due to expansion which I believed for a while until people started to drop away. They say they want to train up and progress people which they do but they also take on a lot of fresh young talent that can be shoehorned into what they want without the right training. - The senior team is not supportive or helpful, they are actually where most of the office gossip starts (Again building an uncomfortable working environment). It was often that I would hear my senior team moaning about team members when they would do the same thing themselves, it was very gossipy and that's what they call the family side of Costello because they are the people that have been there from the start. This made me feel like I couldn't speak or moan about anything because I didn't feel it would be confidential. - The CEO is lovely and seems like a genuine person who wants to help, I feel bad that when meeting her I couldn't be open and honest for the fear It would get back to my manager/team. She said to me they are struggling to find talent and retain them in my area of the business as it can be boring work and I believe this is really what she thinks. When really people in the team just need a more even share of the work variety and more support/better work-life balance and training.

The micromanagement on junior staff if ridiculous. There is no trust, which means junior staff don’t learn to have initiative, or lead for themselves. I didn’t realise until I moved to another agency where I am given an incredible amount of trust, and really praised for my work. At Costello, you will be pulled up on the tiniest things you do in your work that don’t fit their style. Whilst working there I actually broke out in a rash on my face as the stress they were causing me (over very minor things) was ridiculous. The senior staff are actually themselves very junior, and have only a couple of years experience, and mostly have never worked at another agency. They sell this as a pro to you as they hire from the bottom up, but in reality it does not work, as the people doing the managing don’t really know how to do this properly. The way client work is dealt with is incredible stressful. They put so much pressure on staff to meet client deadlines, even when these are ridiculously tight, and hardly ever explain to clients why deadlines can’t be met. I’d assumed this was normal, coming fresh from uni, but working at another agency I now see that most clients are very understanding when something can’t be completed within their ambitious timelines. Whilst working there, I knew of several interns (who in theory, should never have to feel stressed), who felt overworked, micromanaged and severely underpaid considering the extra hours they had to work to meet unrealistic expectations of them. I think a lot of the staff do not realise that their work culture is actually very toxic, as they’ve not had the experience of life at other agencies, and therefore vote highly in company surveys.