Maximus reviews

The company itself. They hire through Temp Agencies, which they contract you for 6 months. Within this 6 month time frame, they find every reason to extend your probational period. IF they take you on as a full time employee, they tell you that your contract was "purchased" from the Temp Agency. Once you are signed on as a Full Time employee, you have an additional 6 months before you are considered for any advancement. They hired me and my training class on at $12 an hour and we were advised that this is a high rate of pay for this geographical location. The classes that came on after my class were hired at $14 an hour...and then $16 an hour, for the same exact position that I was originally hired for. They lock you into a pay rate category for at least another year. If they decide to keep you (after another probational period), you may then apply for other positions. Now, the only positions that ever open up are other positions within your own department, are usually filled almost instantly by one of the newer reps (one of the reps that are signed on for those higher rates I mentioned). Complaints and concerns go unnoticed by higher management as they laugh it off and pay no mind to whats going on within their own departments. People come and go regularly. The turn over rate is horrible. The normal size of a training class is 20 to 25 trainees. Of those hired, maybe a third actually stay. They write people up for things that did not happen. The supervisors have no true source of knowledge and the managers genuinely have no interest in the product. Management is disorganized and the goals are never explained. Everything is unclear this is a very unstable company to work for. There is minimal support staff at most times, and the staff that is available normally knows less than you. The call center supervisors are extremely rude to callers and staff. There have been times where supervisors have yelled at staff. This place needs a whistleblower!

Maximus's key to prosperity is all about meeting the contract requirements of their client, the state. No matter how well the company does, its prosperity does not ever and will not ever trickle down to the rank-and-file employees, who will be paid barely enough of a living wage to support themselves (assuming they're a household of one). Upper management will always tell the rank-and-file staff that in this way, their hands are permanently tied and they cannot do any better for you. In the carrot-and-stick world of Maximus, the sticks are much larger than the carrots: if you don't meet quality and production quotas you'll be placed on double-secret probation double quick, but if you go above and beyond, the best you can hope for is a measly quarterly bonus, recognition certificates that aren't worth the heavy paper stock they're printed on, and maybe a coffee mug or T-shirt, along with an email blast from top management every couple of months telling you "Thank you for what you do." (You know how to thank your employees for what they do? Pay them what they're worth.) It's ironic that the employees' jobs have to do with helping people get help from the state, but that they themselves sometimes have to resort to food stamps and Medicaid because Maximus doesn't pay them enough to live on. Opportunties for advancement are very limited. Overtime is seasonal and unpredictable depending on the case backlog at the moment. Computer servers are frequently slow or crash altogether. You will also be micromanaged to within an inch of your life thanks to software that tracks every second of your working day, and a patronizing management culture that treats line staff like elementary school or at best, middle-school children who can't be trusted to do the jobs they were hired to do. The training programs for call center reps and program technicians sometimes have a tenuous connection to the jobs the new hires are actually supposed to do, and beyond these line-staff levels, on-the-job training is pretty much nonexistent except for "shadowing" someone else in the department until you've picked up the basics. The trainers have the most stable jobs in the company, due to the high employee turnover rate; upper management long ago decided that it's better business to keep training new recruits (taken from a large, local base of docile employees with limited options) every couple of months than keep good, experienced people on by paying them a decent wage. You will also be subjected to constant emails about department potlucks whenever it's somebody's birthday, asked to sign birthday and condolence cards for total strangers, and hit up every month or two with emails from Corporate asking you to contribute to this or that charity (hint: you can't give back to others until you actually get something in the first place). No wonder most employees find other jobs as soon as they can get out of this and into something at least marginally better.