Torch likes to advertise their ESOP benefit front and center in all their recruiting pitches, but that's of limited value to employees they bring on for 2-5 year government contracts. If they don't win the re-competes, those employees will never see the full benefit of the program. Coming over from another company on a contract that Torch won was a... rocky experience. The small HR department seemed overwhelmed with the volume of new hires, with responses sometimes taking weeks, if they came at all. Torch made it very clear that there would be no salary negotiations with new hires on the contract. My options were to either send a paystub to be offered my current salary, or accept a substantial pay cut without the paystub. You will get 15 days of leave whether you've been with Torch for 20 days or 20 years. 15 days isn't a awful amount, and indeed is a fairly standard benefit from many similar companies. However, Torch HR made it very clear that the number will not change, stating that negotiating more leave for new hires "would not be fair" to incumbent employees. Coming from a company that offered 20 days of leave, combined with their refusal to budge on salary offers, made this especially painful. At the time that I was hired, I was given only a single, high deductible health insurance option that... really didn't cover much, and required the deductible to be met before anything was covered. That included medications, requiring some members of my family to move off of medications that became too expensive to cover out of pocket. This is the first company I've ever worked for that only offered a single plan option. With the addition of Juneteenth in 2021, there are 11 federal holidays in which Government facilities close. As of this writing, Torch only recognizes 10 of them, requiring employees on government contracts to choose a holiday to use PTO to cover, rather than paying out the holiday like many of the subcontractors on their contracts seem to manage.
