Pros
Goodwill has a lot of benefits they offer to employees and managers. They have 403B, comprehensive health coverage, and life insurance. They also sponsor education and development initiatives for employees and management staff to help them continually improve. However, access to those programs and initiatives are sometimes limited by space or your ability to negotiate with your immediate supervisor a compromise in your scheduling to attend classes or seminars.
Cons
Goodwill of Central Indiana does not pay a wage even remotely close to the market average for similar retail. This is expected to a degree in that it is non-profit, however the raw numbers are so one sided it begs the question of how they can keep any talent at all. There is a sharp divide between what employees at corporate or in the education division earn as opposed to retail managers. This is ironic in that it is the retail division of goodwill that supplies the vast majority of monetary support to the organization, yet it is the retail division employees and managers who are the lowest paid. The lack of fair market compensation and recent restructuring has caused tremendous problems at the Central Indiana location. Specifically, at a time when the market has a finite amount of jobs to an extraordinary amount of applicants, Goodwill of Central Indiana is having trouble staffing qualified Team Leaders for their stores. This is in part because Team Leaders are hourly paid managers who receive an average starting compensation of $9.50 per hour. These Team Leaders possess store keys, alarm codes, and safe codes. They manage anywhere from 6 - 20+ employees at any given time depending on location and must know how to operate in all areas of the store (perform any job). They train new hires, they can order supplies or trucks, they must be able to understand and pull reports, they audit paperwork, they weigh in on employee performance and evaluation and sit in on interviews and coaching discussions. They must know how to operate and generate reports for safety and loss procedures and they must know who to contact and how to submit requests for maintenance. They also must know how to open and close the store and do various functions in the course of a day such as process a car donation, update the customer database, and maintain collective data for cashiers, and production. A Team Leader is also responsible for assessing the needs of the store against current sales and labor and should, with practice, be capable of cutting labor to help the store fall in line with budget plans and productions. Aside from daily store management activities which require a key and access permissions, a Team Leader must effectively organize and prioritize tasks for the day to accomplish objectives such as meeting production goals, finishing purge of goods or merchandising of goods, logging and checking Shop Goodwill, auditing merchandise and quality purging, overseeing and tasking community service, and maintaining recovery and flow of merchandise on the floor. A Team Leader is capable in many respects of doing almost anything in the store short of Human Resource functions. The cons are that in Central Indiana Goodwill locations they reduced the number of salaried assistant managers from 2 to 1 in each store. Stores that have 2 assistants will not replace one as they are transferred, promoted, or resign. While the company boasts a high growth rate, they have effectively eliminated any real opportunity for Team Leaders to advance. Further, many of the assistant managers have been with the company for a decent amount of time. They cannot get promoted unless another store opens up. Since opportunities at corporate are limited they cannot easily make a transition. Therefore, they too are in a holding pattern. This lack of forward mobility coupled with excessively below market average and standards for compensation drives Team Leaders to quit and seek much higher paying opportunities elsewhere for performing the same job (upwards of 7 - 8000 more dollars compensation a year). Salaried managers at goodwill retail locations are also terribly compensated monetarily. They would earn, in many cases (excluding those tenured managers with 5 or more years in company) at least 7 - 10,000 dollars more a year starting salary for what they do. The compensation and advancement opportunity is just not there for too many employees. It is a great place to work, but at some point and on some level a person will have to weigh their financial needs against Goodwill of Central Indiana's ability to meet them.
