Pros
GEICO has yearly profit sharing, but the first chunk goes to an account that you only receive if you stay with the company 5 years. The second chunk is direct deposited. As an auto damage adjuster you get a company car that has gas, insurance, and maintenance covered, and unlimited personal mileage as long as you notify your supervisor of out of state trips. On the other hand, you pay ~$130/month for the "privilege" and it has GEICO advertising all over it, so you represent the company whenever you drive it. Decent pay raises when you have "excellent" performance. I've been at the company for two years, and am earning 28% more than I was as a trainee. You have some vacation days and floating holidays. Being sick consumes sick days, then vacation days if you run out of sick days. Having a serious health issue can cost you all of your time off, whether you were enjoying time in Tahiti or a hospital. There are clear goals that define your value to the company - See cons for a description.
Cons
It is nearly impossible to meet all the goals without gaming the system somehow (mostly by working unpaid or underpaid overtime). If you care about your emotional health, DO NOT WORK FOR GEICO. If you are able to compartmentalize completely and have no empathy or concern about your success or customers' well being, you might be fine emotionally. Half the adjusters I know have started taking Xanax or other anxiety meds since starting as auto damage adjusters for GEICO. I recently started taking Xanax due to the stress and anxiety overwhelming me almost daily. I receive an average of 20 emails a day, 5-15 phone calls per day, and have to write 5-7 estimates per day, including travel time, lunch, and breaks (I do not take breaks, and take as short a lunch as I can). On a day of severe accidents, just writing 5 estimates easily consumes your entire 7.75 hour workday (including travel time between locations). Even on those days you are expected to answer the phone 100% of the time (this is a survey question - you must "always" be available immediately for the customer, even if you are in an appointment with a customer face-to-face). Answering 20 emails a day about any claim you have EVER written (I've had customers bring up issues more than a year after repairs were completed) consumes an addition half hour to an hour, depending on how much you have to do. Making outbound follow-up calls to shops and customers consumes another hour. Basically, you are expected to do 10-11 hours worth of work every day, but do it within 7.75 hours. You can be constantly behind and work 8AM to 4:30PM, or you can work unpaid overtime and MAYBE stay on top of everything. Alternatively, you can put the extra two-three hours on your time card, get paid less than HALF your normal hourly wage (it's called "PREMIUM" time haha), decrease your productivity (the extra time counts as hours worked, even if you get paid less), and be criticized by supervisors and managers for putting it on your time card. METRICS/GOALS - HOW GEICO JUDGES THEIR ADJUSTERS AND DETERMINES RAISES/PROMOTIONS: Productivity measures how many estimates/claims you handle versus other adjusters. The general goal is to have at least 5 new inspections per day to meet the goal. If some of those 5 are supplements you do not get as much credit. If any of them are total losses you will invest hours settling the total loss for no increase in productivity. You are encouraged to skip lunch, take no breaks, and work unpaid overtime to increase this number. The most successful adjusters work unpaid overtime to pad this number, when in reality it can be very easy or impossible to meet the goal, depending on the severity of the accidents assigned to you. Customer service is basically someone who has no idea what your job is deciding whether they liked the way you did your job. Basically, a survey asks loaded questions to customers about their experience, and anything, even things beyond your control or the scope of your job, can sink you on the survey. The only acceptable response on the customer survey is "excellent." I have had customers decline to give an excellent rating because of GEICO policies that I cannot change, but my survey rating is still used to determine pay raises and advancement in the company. You are hounded CONSTANTLY if your customer service surveys drop below 80% excellent. The survey suggests that adjusters will ALWAYS be available, even though we have set work hours. This means customers get upset when you don't answer their calls on Sunday, Saturday, or at 4AM, they give you a bad survey, and there is literally nothing you can do about it except work unpaid overtime to answer crazy people's phone calls on your off hours. If a customer tries to get you to repair unrelated damage and you do your job and deny obviously unrelated damage (an example being "Someone rear ended me, but my transmission started leaking, my brake pads wore down, and I got rock chips on the front of my car"), you may lose a survey for DOING YOUR JOB CORRECTLY. Severity is a measurement of the average cost of the repairs that you write. A properly written estimate can range within a thousand dollars just based on judgment and shops' willingness to negotiate, but an adjuster has NO CONTROL over which accidents are assigned to them - if you are unlucky and get lots of large accidents on expensive cars, your severity metric will be awful even if you write technically accurate/correct estimates. If you pay for things that are NOT RELATED to the claim, this can easily get out of control, but some adjusters do it to earn surveys. Reinspections - This measures the technical accuracy of your estimates, and SHOULD be the most important measurement of an estimator's worth to a company. GEICO reinspectors will go through your estimates and deduct points for anything they can possibly argue could have been cheaper or different. Depending on your supervisor and manager you may get leeway or not. In my experience reinspections have been fair, and I've only been marked down for legitimate mistakes I made. Rentals - You are judged by how long customers keep rental cars - if you get a lot of large accidents, you will have customers in rentals for longer. There is a formula that determines how many days are "reasonable" for a repair, but if the shop takes their sweet time on a repair (and they almost always do, they don't care how long a customer is in a rental car unless they're paying for it - and they won't even if it's their fault there are delays) you are faced with cutting off the customer's rental and getting a poor survey, or extending it for as long as it takes for their shop to finish the work. You actually have very little control over rental unless you are willing to sacrifice surveys and follow the formula to the day mercilessly.