Pros
Excellent training program: Definitely the best training program I've gone through. (During training is the only time you feel an ounce of pride and optimism for the future, but that is because of the great instructors and nothing else) A decent starting salary for what you think you're job will be (Factor in the terrible benefits package and it doesn't seem so decent anymore though)
Cons
Too many to list, but here are a few of the top -Not a meritocracy: Very few branch managers are leaders or mentors. They are mostly underhanded people that were able to brown nose, join the right clique and be in the right place at the right time because they are in a busy branch and their sales either came to them, or they were able to work the system and steal sales from other branches or "teammates" at their own branch (usually a combination of both). The few good managers out there either end up leaving or are pushed out for not "following the SunTrust way" aka-Selling by any means necessary... -Cliques: At the retail level if you are not part of your branch/area manager's clique you will go nowhere and will be actively held back. (I pretend to be a part of one of these cliques for survival purposes only and it definitely keeps me up at night among many other things) -Divide and Conquer: Pressure to sell trumps all else and management pits coworkers against each other so you don't have the time or energy to raise concerns about unethical behavior by coworkers or managers. Even if you did, you automatically become a pariah and are eventually pushed out or they make their life so miserable they eventually quit. (I've seen it numerous times since I started so don't think for a second HR will protect you from retaliation.) They promote saying something if you see any unethical behavior, but you will become a target if you dare do so... -The starting salary may seem decent until you find out how terrible the benefit packages are. One of the reasons the salary seems decent upon initial offering is due to the fact that the benefit package is terrible. If you want health insurance for yourself (and actually use it) then just deduct 10K from whatever number you're given. Plus, whatever your starting salary is you better get used to it for quite a while because raises come out of the manager's bonus which creates incentive for them to find reasons not to give you one. -Consistently and purposely understaffed so upper management can collect giant bonuses which forces branch level management to pick up the slack with no extra compensation. -Turnover: I have never seen so many people come and go in such short amounts of time at any company I've worked for. It's almost laughable how obvious their strategy is for bringing people onboard to get the most out of them as they can and as soon as they burn out they are gone.
