Edward Jones reviews

Culture of Nepotism. FA's are typically given some asset base at the start of their career to get them going. FA's with no inside connections are typically awarded $5-10 million to manage while wives, husbands, sons, daughters, and friends of the region are given up to $50-$100+ million. This essentially does all of the hard work for these individuals and sets them up for guaranteed success right away before they prove themselves. The best example in my region was a spouse of an existing FA that inherited a retiring advisors office and hit level 8 in less than a year. Other FAs in the same class were lucky to hit level 1 in a year. Your regional leader is your boss. As much as it will feel like you do not have a boss and you have independence to run your own business, you regional leader is your boss. They have control over you and if they do not think highly of you they do not have to offer help. They are the gate keeper of the region. Most FA's that you talk to will praise the company but know that for every FA that lasts MANY MANY more have burned out, failed, or left out of frustration. You are not hearing from those people. This is why they rate so highly in employee satisfaction surveys. Training is based on the 1980's. EJ training is easily 40 years out of date. They want you to door knock, solicit people on Linked in, and ask EVERYONE about their investments. They do very little to assist and you are expected to be networking or making calls when you are not in an appt. They do not provide the numbers to call or contracts to solicit so you will have to be knocking on doors every day. Compliance is extremely strict. You will notice that other financial firms are doing things you are not able. You can not post most things to social media, you can not give seminars in you own words (must be read exactly as written by compliance), ALL video content is banned. They make it exceptionally difficult to market yourself. They have an internal EJ Match program that matches FAs with clients but in 2 years I received 2 and both prospects never answers or responded to my calls. Its essentially worthless. EJ does not reward employees for being good FA. They really don't care about how you are helping clients. They ONLY care about how much new business you are bringing in. Just know EJ is not going to make you a great FA, they are going to want AUM. ALL training is built around prospecting, not asset managment. Experience FA's will regularly couch you on monetizing your book of business. As time goes on you will see that experienced FAs are more concerned about the revenue a client generates and not about their actual goals.

Do not work in IT at Jones if you are a woman who is not in to agreeing with *everything* all the men say and do and everything women up the chain of command to you say and do. When I started at EJ, I was glad to work at a place that was on the list for best places to work. However, despite the fact that I was in a department where I was told it was people first, my experience was often far from that. I tried to get management to help me with a gender harassment case but my concerns were largely dismissed. I filed a report to HR. Then, my manager wanted me to have 1:1 meetings with the person I filed the report against. I told my manager that I wasn't comfortable with it, and for a time she seemed okay with it. A few months later, she wrote me a bad performance review in retaliation for me going to HR and telling her I wasn't cool with how she handled the situation. Note, she went super out of her way to try to get me to trust her by saying things like "you can vent to me", "you can pull me out of a meeting to talk" and "hold my feet to the fire if I'm not the leader you need me to be". I tried going to my skip level about the retaliation, and he dismissed my concerns saying things like "firm surveys indicate most people don't have a problem with her" and "management satisfaction is much higher in this department to others at the firm". Even after the retaliation from my manager, other people got me dressed down for expressing disagreement and some frustration which the men got to do without anyone calling them out. I was treated like I ridiculous and out of control, when in reality I wanted to be taken seriously with my harassment case, have a manager that was open and honest with me, and have the same opportunity others were given to voice disagreement.