HUB International reviews

HUB has many happy employees in their regional offices which is where they get most of their raving reviews. However, their corporate office is another story and the cons are listed below... High Turnover Rate Both IT and Marketing corporate teams are experiencing a high turnover. This is largely due to employees being overworked by having one individual do the job of three, needing to work late hours, feeling undervalued by leadership, and being completely underpaid compared to industry standards. Even if employees are miraculously able to achieve the tight deadlines set by leadership, they’re hardly recognized or rewarded. HR is also another department that is experiencing high turnover due to layoffs that are being implemented. Leadership doesn't seem all that concerned by the high turnover. In their minds, they believe that these members of the team can be easily replaced and do very little to retain their employee count. Poor Benefits Maternity/paternity leave is not offered by the company unless you’re lucky enough to live in Canada. Instead, HR encourages people to save up their sick days to utilize if maternity/paternity leave is needed since that is the only PTO that rolls over year to year. However, there seems to be a misalignment between that message and that of payroll’s since they reprimand individuals who take more than 3 sick days in a row without a proper doctor’s note. PTO is the standard two weeks of vacation with paid holidays, personal days, etc. Employees are told that they are not allowed to work remotely because this looks bad from an "optics" point of view. Yet leadership is hardly ever in the office which is hypocritical of the standard they set for their employees. HUB used to match 401k contributions on a pay period basis, but they enacted an annual match instead. What that means is the employee must be employed up until December 31st of that year in order to receive the matching offer. The communication of this to current employees was poor and many suspect that this is the company’s way to curb the high turnover rate. Raises and promotions rarely happen. Leadership has a tendency to pick favorites and those are the ones that are rewarded, but others are seen as a number cranking out work rather than being recognized. With absolutely no room for growth, many are pushed to leave and find work elsewhere to continue growing in their career. Unapproachable Leadership The leadership at corporate constantly set unreasonable goals for their teams to execute. There’s a large disconnect from what leadership promises to the company’s investors and executive team, and the resources that are available to execute. Heaven forbid if employees try to speak up and make leadership understand that more resources are needed. Leadership doesn’t want to hear what can’t be done, they want to hear that you’ll do the work even if that means you reach the point of burn out. Speaking of burn out, when employees share that they’re feeling overwhelmed with upper management, management will claim that it’s a “good thing” to feel that way and do little to nothing to help alleviate an employee’s workload. Whether employees are feeling overwhelmed or not, they’re expected to remain upbeat and engaged. If employees don’t, they’ll be told to do both by their direct manager. Yes, the words “smile more!” has come out of the mouths of upper management. Clearly, the list of cons can go on and on. If the above doesn’t suffice in persuading you to seek employment elsewhere, then perhaps you’re a good fit for the nepotistic, bro culture that HUB takes great pride in.

I was hired as a Compliance Specialist to consult with HUB's current clients involving compliance matters and employee benefits questions. In the initial interview, I clearly informed my boss that I had no prior formal training in either area, particularly in benefits administration, so she was fully aware that I did not have strong experience in this area. Shortly after I began working there, I was thrown to the wolves, so to speak, attempting to field questions that I was far from an expert in the subject matter. I did my very best to research what I didn't know and get by. What I was HIRED to do was to assist in startup of a new division of the employee benefits group, a compliance consulting group, which I was hired to be a "partner" of. Having started two businesses of my own, she saw that I was a good candidate for this. She had absolutely NOTHING ready when I started...no templates, no formal contracts (no idea of what she wanted, either, and was clueless to it all), no processes, NOTHING. I jumped in head first and did absolutely everything to get this new venture off the ground; including making the suggestion of adding recruiting to our services (since that was what my background in HR was, specifically). She was thrilled about this, as it would bring in over 3x the revenue that consulting was going to be bringing in. As a result of my personal contributions, in just 9 months, I brought in over $65,000.00 in new revenue to the company. At the same time I was rocking the new recruitment model that I had created from scratch, as well as doing one-on-one consulting with clients, this money-hungry, inexperienced manager had began systematically turning on me on a dime. Initially, I was told that I would be a "partner" of the group and that she was going to work on getting a commission out of our consulting/recruiting revenue. Not only did I get shut out of that, I was given a TERRIBLE 6 month review with most of the review points indicating that I was "not meeting company expectations". Also, in the midst of this chaos, I had requested a reasonable accommodation (sit/stand desk) for my degenerative disc disease condition. After requesting this simple accommodation, which would have cost this billion dollar organization a mere $400, I was forced to work on top of cardboard boxes for the next several MONTHS while HR completely dragged their feet with their almost non-existent interactive process. My boss also informed me that working from home was NOT an accommodation and I had to work in a cubicle in the office EVERY day. So, I waited and waited for the accommodation that never came. The irony of it all was that I had consulted with clients about this very thing and stressed to them the importance of providing a "quick and painless" interactive process and a reasonable accommodation. I was humiliated, in pain and beyond frustrated, but tried to keep a smile on my face every day. There were several fellow employees who witnessed this and gave me their support. But the management wanted nothing to do with this and almost went out of their way to ignore me, as if I was some kind of crackpot who was asking for some unreasonable accommodation. At the end of my tenure at HUB, I worked with a fellow consultant out of HQ who had concerns about the type of work that we were doing with our clients, and claimed that in doing this, we could potentially be putting ourselves in danger of being PERSONALLY liable. After speaking with this colleague, I contacted the corporate legal staff member directly, expressing my concerns over potential personal liability. Not only did he inform me that YES, I could be in danger of being held PERSONALLY LIABLE for errors and omissions, he informed me that this was NOT the company's model and that they would never endorse this type of work. (Incidentally, my contact with legal was also my very last day with HUB, as I was fired that afternoon). My boss had been LYING to us all along, telling us that she had been in contact with legal and that we were given the green light on everything. So, this money-grubbing manager, whose blatant disregard for the company's business model put me in a terrible position to be personally liable for a lawsuit. Scary, to say the VERY least. I would never recommend this company to anyone. I saw nothing but unprofessional, illegal activity, and utter disregard for its employees' well-being. The CEO preached and preached about HUB's commitment to its employees and the promotion of the self-directed work team. HUB better pay closer attention to the management of these self-directed work teams, as I believe it may be opening the doors to some pretty hefty lawsuits. They should also pay closer attention to the HR staff that makes every excuse as to why they cannot provide a reasonable accommodation to someone who has a legitimate ADA condition, had provided the proper documentation of this condition and worked in complete pain every day, hunched over cardboard boxes. All the while, management (including the CEO) completely looked the other way and refused to provide an accommodation.