Pros
5+ years ago Hilti used to be a great place to work although cracks were forming already. 10+ years ago Hilti was an amazing place to work. There is not a lot left that makes it compelling to stay. The positives left are the product. I do not always agree with the companies strategies and launch times of product. But generally all of the products are very well engineered. It is rare to make excuses for product. Overall there is still a lot of great people in the company, You generally will not be stuck with a terrible boss because they usually get weeded out. Some benefits are still very good (but not all): 401k match, education assistance, if your in a specialist sales role or management you get a very nice vehicle. The account managers usually get a RAV4 or Ford truck, stripped down. But insurance and gas is paid for.
Cons
Since January 2023 Hilti has absolutely gone crazy with micromanaging due to the construction slow down. If you enjoy spending about an hour a day or longer sitting in front of Salesforce entering data that no one will look at, work at Hilti. You also need to have several meetings every single week instead of selling in the field. They also required you to log your calls and put everything on your outlook calendar planned from Salesforce. And expect to have to share your calendar every week with your manager and your managers manager. There is also a lot of things that by themselves are not a big deal, but combine them together and it will drive you crazy. Good luck getting customer service, logistics, and credit to help you at all. They are trained nowadays to treat account managers and lazy and stupid. You also cannot talk to a specific person anymore, everything is using general mail boxes that take a day to hear back from. If you change pricing on an item, enjoy going through 2-4 levels for approval to get it released. They release 99% of orders anyway, they just want to make it hard to discount off their ridiculously high prices. Customers are also constantly ripped off for loyalty because they do not shop around as much. Some customers pricing could be 80% less than a similar customer across the street. They set template pricing so insanely high that you better know general market pricing or you will get laughed at. They heavily restrict what tools you have on your van and force you to rotate them. So most people quit carry tools, so good luck seeing a real tool demo. (but hey they save lots of money on inventory). Lets talk about one of worst parts of the company when your in the field trying to sell: Logistics. Hilti's logistics is literally the worst in the business. If you are in a rural territory its not too bad. But if you are in a large city that requires couriers to deliver to jobsites, Hilti almost has nothing. Instead of hiring couriers, they sub it out to 3rd party companies, who are really terrible. Some areas have long lead times to get product, when a customer can easily call a local supply house and get it next day or same day. Hilti also started a stupid program forcing customers to pay for prepaid shipping, or they get charged an outrageous amount each time. Customers really really really hate this and Hilti doesn't care. The other dump program Hilti started was charging customers if they do not ship from their primary distribution center. So if Visalia is out of product you either wait days or weeks until its stocked, or they force the cusotmer to pay like $75 to ship it from Dallas (and thats on top of the $2500 in prepaid freight each year). After building up a huge career at Hilti for 20 years I had enough and left this year. I do not regret it for a second. I no longer recommend you work here. If your going to get micromanaged to death you might as well go somewhere that pays $100k base salary starting out. Take a look at their turnover the last 4 years, its crazy. Some teams of 6 people have already been replaced 3 times. There is a reason for this. It was not this way 10 years ago, most sales teams were full of 10+ year vets.
