Softchoice reviews

3.8

75% would recommend to a friend

(1,292 total reviews)
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Andrew Caprara

81% approve of CEO

66% positive business outlook

Softchoice has an employee rating of 3.8 out of 5 stars, based on 1,292 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Softchoice employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

1K reviews
2.0
Feb 26, 2015

Great company to work for. . . if you are a dog!

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Certain teams are fun, mostly the people who deal with the clients, and there is real camaraderie among them.

Cons

Some of the senior leaders are not realy flexible and adaptable to change, and if they do bring change, it has to be on their own terms and only what they believe is worth trying. The company is struggling to establish a more mature image, however, because the leaders are not interested in listening to anybody but themselves, they don't know which way to go, and they are slow to adopt things that have been proven to work great for so many other companies. Don't believe them if they tell you they help you develop and progress in your career! This is just lip service. The company doesn't even have a tuition reimbursement benefit, so people cannot really educate themselves and prepare themselves for a higher role. The excuse is that people learn 70% of a job on the job. BUt how do you get there if you are lacking some formal education, for instance leadership courses, and cannot afford to take them on your own? You're stuck. The company does not invest in ts people and their education. Instead, it spends money on the so- called "beer cart" event each month. What a waste! Who cares about a bottle of beer at the end of the day on a Friday once a month, when the day-to-day work environment is not rewarding and motivating? The bottom line is: the company has very little money to really grow, and its senior leaders lack the vision to make it into a great company.

4.0
Sep 27, 2014

Challenging, but very rewarding.

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The physical space is excellent. The people are brilliant. I never had a "personnel" issue in 8 years. Occasional disagreements sure, but nothing that lasted the day. Lots of new stuff to deal with and training to help but you had to push for it. I started in a moderate position and was promoted to Director so career opportunity is there. Executives make every opportunity to communicate to employees about company events.

Cons

Changes to benefits and parking costs were not positive. Not terrible - benefits are still good just not as good. Old fashioned performance review process is a complete pain.

2.0
Jan 31, 2014

A stepping stone, at best

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

1. Great 'surface level' corporate culture and atmosphere 2. You can bring your dog to work 3. Good place to build experience if you're just getting out of school 4. Softchoice has a great eye for hiring very good and effective employees. My team was fantastic at what they did and they were great people to talk to and get to know.

Cons

1. Horrible pay for the amount of work required, and I mean horrible. Other companies pay literally twice as much for the same work. 2. Too much micro management. I can understand it at the beginning of your tenure but, once you've proven yourself, management needs to understand that you're being effective for a reason and let you do your thing. If you start to slip, then sure, step in and help. 3. Managers do exactly that: Manage. They don't Lead their team, they don't inspire their team. They don't build rapport with their team to get them on their side. It's a "Do what I say or face the consequences" type of dialogue, despite their appearance of asking us for feedback.. 4. Too much nepotism. People getting promoted who clearly do not deserve the job and then they end up managing a team of people more qualified than them. This can explain #3. Softchoice training literally states that people get promoted based on exposure, not performance. So you have unqualified people managing those that are much better at the job than they are. 5. Too much propaganda. Softchoice talks a big game about who they are and what they believe in but when it comes to application, they fall short 95% of the times. They held meetings with employees to discuss what will make them a happier and better company and 3 years later they still haven't done anything worthy of change (though they sure tried to sell us on the idea that the little changes they did were FANTASTIC.) 6. Very old school sales mentality and very contradicting sales training. They tell you they want you to hit very specific high volume metrics that would take a day to complete on its own, and then ask you why you aren't spending some focused time creating a strategy to attack certain prospects. As a result, you have to just bear the heat from your managers while you do the right thing to hit your quotas anyway (meaning: strategy focused research, not dial every company in the phone book and hope someone talks to you). Training during on-boarding of the job is HIGHLY contradicting versus training once you're about 1-1.5 years in. Many employees grow very frustrated and confused at this point in their tenure which understandably leads to performance concerns and unclear direction. 7. Which leads to very low employee morale. If it wasn't for the other amazing employees i worked with, I would've quit long ago. 8. You have to work 9 hour days with an unpaid lunch and then you have to make sure you spend your lunch hour the way they want you to spend it. 9. Management is not on your side. When dealing with an issue where another department messed up on something that was outside of my control, Management did nothing to help and said that's just how it is. As a result I didn't get paid for the business that I spent several months closing. 10. The salary and compensation provided is ludicrous. No employees get a raise, not for tenure or stellar performance. Your salary and target income stays EXACTLY the same each year. However, each new year your targets grow, therefore you have to sell exponentially that much more to make the same amount of money as you did before (this has typically equated to increasing your business by over 75% year-over-year just in order to MATCH what your income was the year before.) Here's the rub, newbies to the same role as you get the exact same salary and target income as you--a tenured rep--do, but since it's their first year, they're given much smaller quotas to attain. They literally only have to sell HALF as much as you do in order to earn the SAME income as you do. This means that if a newbie had a stellar first year and sold the EXACT SAME AMOUNT as you did, they would earn TWICE AS MUCH as you did for bringing in the EXACT SAME AMOUNT of gross profit. Nothing about what I just said was exaggerated. Let that sink in.

Viewing 430 - 432 of 1,292 Reviews

Glassdoor has 1,364 Softchoice reviews submitted anonymously by Softchoice employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Softchoice is right for you.