Pros
Amazing benefits plan, including great health insurance from day one, one week vacay after 6 months and two weeks after a year, one week paid suck days, dental and vision insurance, 401k company match and stock options, short term disability that is amazing should you ever need it, great tech support, and in the beginning of my career there, fast promotion from within to the right candidates, and 4% commission on my sales as an FSR/Loan officer when I reached my sales goals, and tellers also made commission on every sale or appointment that they made with a customer service rep that resulted in a new account.
Cons
The teller pay is amazingly low considering that the tellers arde the face of the bank for every customer that walks in the door. I was started at $9/hr, but the benefits were so amazing I took the job. The training was great, but we were promised raises after training for and reaching a new level of teller and these raises would take forever to be applied and were very small. I hjigh was great at sales as a teller so was promoted to FSR where sales and account openings, loans, setting investment appointments, etc were my functions. They started me at a mere $11 and hour for this job, which was very stressful and high pressure, and commission if I reached 100% of my goal (which was VERY high). I found out later that I was started nat $2/hr less than co-workers with less experience who didn't work their way up like I did. I did enjoy building my customer base and the promotions we offered customers were amazing, but when things changed to high pressured sales (including after-hour call parties, which made us telemarketers!!), customers became unhappy and so did we. As a loan officer, we were in charge of ALL of the work....making the sale, taking application, running credit, getting all of the tedious information, ordering appraisal, asking all of the questions....only to send it in to processing for them to nit-pick every single thing, causing us to call our customers multiple times to ask them questions that were crazy. Once all of this was done, it got sent to underwriting for approval, which would result in either more crazy things you had to find out from your customer (annoying them further) or it would result in approval, which I then had to take care of getting the closing documents ready, setting up the closing, and conducting the closing myself. One loan, even a small one, would end up taking hours out of your day for several days...sometimes weeks...and no extra compensation unless you reached your virtually unobtainable sales goal. It also took away the ability to make easy sakes like opening new accounts because I was so wrapped up in all of the back and forth in the loan processing. The worst part of lending: when I worked hard to earn a loyal customer base and the loan processing center would find some reason (usually a silly one) to deny a loan, and I had to do the dirty work of looking a valued customer in the eyes and telling them they were declined. I had to put up with the anger, crying, and sometimes loss of a customer. I really feel like this should have been the loan processors job since they denied the loan and won't be losing a customer by telling them. Oh yeah....and something they should think about.....they sent out a company wide report for everyone to see several times a month with every sales reps goal and percent to goal for the month. This can be a huge ego boost if you are over 100% of your goal...but if you happen to have a bad month (which happened seasonally at the bank) you were humiliated and very discouraged. I hated that practice a lot. If you want to work here: as a teller, be prepared to handle tons of stuff at one time, tons of traffic and lines and working quickly with no mistakes, being pressured to make appointments, little raises, little recognition for doing one of the most imprtant jobs in the bankl, and small base pay. As an FSR and loan officer: be prepared for major sales pressure, low commissions (it has been cut down to 1% if you reach your goal, which was almost impossible to do on a regular basis, meetings with higher ups should you fall below your goal, staying after work until 7 orn 8pm doing telemarketing sales calls to set appointments, and very little hourly compensation for bringing in all of the business.