Families First Counseling Services reviews

1. I do NOT recommend this job for people with families. You WILL have to neglect your own family in order to successfully meet Families First job requirements. 2. NO work-life balance. You will immediately have a full caseload. You will work split shifts. A normal day for me would be meeting with clients/doing supervised visits from 9am-2pm & 4:30-7:30pm, then 9-11pm working on notes/documentation at home. 3. They claim to promote self-care, yet they require you to have an unreasonably high caseload, and there are serious consequences if you don’t get in all your SBC sessions and supervised visits each month. 4. Families First assigns you to a specific county, but you are expected to drive to other counties to transport clients and supervise visits, which increases your mileage and gas costs, and adds hours on to your already busy day. 5. The company treats you like a contractor, but classifies you as an employee so you can’t write-off business expenses on your taxes. You have to drive your OWN vehicle hundreds of miles every week and pay for your OWN gas (driving 2000 miles per month is a real possibility). You can’t write-off the mileage or car insurance on your taxes because you are an employee which means that the company gets all of YOUR tax deductions, and all you get is paying high gas prices and pricey maintenance/repair bills for your car. The company justifies this by saying that they “pay the highest wages in the area”, which is NOT true if you take into account all of your out-of-pocket expenses that you would not have with other like businesses, because those companies offer their employees company vehicles, they pay for gas, and they help cover your cell phone expenses. 6. You have to use your own cell phone for business calls, or pay for a separate “business” phone out-of-pocket. Clients will call your phone all hours of the day and night, and on weekends. The company does not provide any sort of reimbursement for you using your own cell phone for business, even when 90% of your calls/texts will be business-related. You will spend 3 hours each day working in your home doing documentation, but can’t claim your home-office on taxes because (you guessed it) Families First gets the tax deductions that YOU should be getting. 7. You will receive minimal/inadequate training before they hand you a full caseload and send you in to people's home by yourself, so the company can immediately make money off you. (They claim they offer sufficient training, but that is far from truth - everything you learn is on-the-job, you have no one with you to train you while you’re meeting with the families; you just fly by the seat of your pants, call your supervisor after-the-fact, and hope you made the right decision). They offer additional training the longer you are there, but you are so busy with your high caseload it’s impossible to figure out a time to do extra training, unless you’re fine with working 60+ hour weeks. 8. Families First has the worst benefits package I have ever had as a full-time employee: 3 days of paid vacation per year (laughable), expensive health insurance, and no retirement match.

Hard to get visits scheduled sometimes and pay varies.