Pros
This all depends on which umbrella company/area/department you work for. Flexible schedule and moderate support of work/life balance, opportunity for skills development, good benefits. I honestly believe that executive management has good intentions.
Cons
Again, this all depends on which umbrella company/area/department you work for. Internal IT support is outsourced to India, which poses a few problems. First, since Emdeon has acquired so many different companies, IT supports probably hundreds of different applications for a bunch of different sites. This means that IT is very fragmented and getting support on even minimal desktop issues means spending several hours in emails/phone calls to get an issue resolved. New employee onboarding is a nightmare from this perspective as well, with many new employees being with the company for a full 30 days or more without having access to all of the systems/applications that they need to perform their job function. If you are offered a position, be prepared to deal with HireRight, the background check company that they utilize which is also located in another country. You will spend some time trading emails/phone calls back and forth with them as they fail in their very limited endeavors to verify prior employment, education, etc using the accurate info you have provided. For example, in one case they failed to verify employment for a new hire because the prior employer required that HireRight send a verification form to the HR department for information requests...apparently they had no clue what this was and that many entities in the USA will not give out information without first verifying the identity of the requester. HireRight, in turn, contacted the new hire directly and requested that they send in tax forms to verify employment via unsecured FAX, which was completely unnecessary and also a possible breach of privacy. Long story short, if you experience any difficulty, contact your HR person in Nashville to rectify. Communication and cooperation between departments is fragmented. Management style is a hybrid of willy nilly, fire department and micromanagement. Negligible clients are supported with fervor and urgency, while larger PAYING clients are virtually ignored. Project plans are non-existent or ditched midstream. You will often be pulled from regular job duties to a project that was touted as OMG it's a dire emergency, only to be told 2 days later that things have changed and we are now switching gears to a different project that is OMG a bigger and more severe dire emergency. Meanwhile, there is no project plan or metrics in place to verify the execution or outcome of these emergencies. When review time comes, you had better keep documented evidence of what you worked on, because you will be judged on not fulfilling "regular" job duties even though you spent the last 6 months straight working on several dead-end projects at the request of management. As another reviewer stated, this company is in a constant cycle of acquiring new companies and reorganization. There is usually an announcement that your division **may** be affected, and then static on the line for the next several months until you abruptly arrive at work one morning to find out that several people no longer works for the company due to these changes, or that you are being moved under a different manager or company, or both.
