Pros
Good training, both self study and interactive. Great support from senior recruiters who genuinely want you to succeed. Focus on honest interpersonal communication within the teams. Meeting up with and getting to know contractors and what their plans and wishes were was the highlight. Good job to start out your career.
Cons
Work life balance: You are officially required to work your 40 hours, but it is made very clear that if you want to succeed, you had better put in more like 60 hours/week. Which would be sort of ok, if it was for some time, but even senior recruiters with several years in the company are putting in 60 hour work weeks. These are used as role models to show how hard work pays off, instead of rewarding them. Do not mistake me, I have no problem working myself ragged, but not while on top of it consistently putting in 50% more hours (which are not paid OT). This is not a 9-5 job, no matter how they say you are free to go after your 8 hours. Company culture: The people in the office that were straight out of, or a few years out of, college will not complain about the work hours, and these are the people that seems to end up staying with the company. The company has a very frat boy vibe to it, and if you are not that, you are not part of the cool crowd. If you don't fit the mold, you are pushed out. As a professional with several years work experience before joining TEK, I found it trying to be told how to dress and act to be professional, while being hit in the back of my head by a nerf ball. Working with contractors: You are encouraged to nickel and dime every single contractor you put to work. This is, of course, where the money is made, but being assigned to reqs for higher level IT professionals making lots of money per hour, and having already negotiated them down, I found it petty when my AM would ask me to squeeze another buck-oh-five out of them. Even more so with a candidate making 15/hr, as they need this $ even more. Somewhere along the line, we lose track of the fact that these are people we are working with. While the camaraderie between recruiters was great (you're in the trenches together, after all), at the same time you knew that only a select few would hesitate to snatch your candidate from under your nose if they could make a few bucks off them. "You snooze, you loose" along with "work hard, party hard" sums it up.
