Arguably the most important part of a company review, Vanguard has many weaknesses that are very apparent at the current time. For starters, we are extremely understaffed at the moment which has given rise to processing timeframes of over a month in some cases. You can imagine a clients reaction when you tell them this. Even worse is their reaction when they were given wrong information and they have to start over.
To be fair, the powers that be have recently begun an overtime bonus incentive to help cut down on the backlog of paperwork as well as the hold time a client experiences while calling Vanguard - $150 bonus for 5 hours of OT in a two week period, $350 for 10 hours and $500 for 15 hours. This is being offered for the time being and the response has been very positive as we all need the money.
During our worst times this summer, clients were waiting upwards of 2-3 hours before speaking with a representative. This makes your job of answering a phone for 7.5 hours a day much more intolerable when you're getting yelled at for something out of your control. Things seem to be slowly turning around but you still have almost no days where there is any time between calls and this is supposed to be the "off-season". Just wait until tax season is back and pray you make it through.
Pay. Everyone starts at $40,000 a year. No, this is not rocket science, however, there is a reason TIAA is known as 3 North Falls (inside joke for people who work in Charlotte). I know for a fact the same job at TIAA with the same PTO and a small difference in hours pays $55,000 during training at $57,000 afterward with a bonus of between 5-10k. This role has a base partnership multiplier of $2200. Depending on our average net inflow of assets over the prior three year period, we get a multiple that averages around 2.2x.
The first year pay in itself is not what people care about. It's the pay potential after your first year.
Every job is given a level. These levels determine your pay range. This pay range is what Vanguard says is "competitive pay" which would be true if you ever got close to the top of each pay range. A "promotion" would be going from an IC2 role (where you start) to an IC3 role. This gives you a flat 7% raise. Your "pay for performance incentives" can then give you another 1-3% on top of that depending on how you are rated by management. Now just for fun, let's say you go from IC2 to IC5 (the top pay bracket in the retail grouping). The bottom of the range in this bracket is 50k for an IC5 role. You do receive the minimum which is nice considering you just made a 10k increase in salary after one year, however, this implies you are arguably the top 1% of talent in the company and yet, will only get paid ~ $6-7 thousand more a year than the halfwit who gets pushed into an IC3 role to make room for the new hires coming in.
Two of our four metrics are based on asset consolidation (pretty easy, a lot of people want to bring their money here) and generating leads for our Personal Advisor Service - this is disguised as 'investing solutions' since we are not legally able to sell anything because of our licensing. The line is very gray as to whether or not we're 'selling' or 'finding a need and positioning a service to fill the need' as they like to tell us. It literally comes down to the words you use while positioning the service but I digress - and we receive no commission. Great for clients and our bottom line, not great at boosting morale and drumming up enthusiasm.
This isn't necessarily a con of the company but rather a con in general. It's a call center. Call centers are not fun. Even our advisors are nothing more than glorified robots acting as underutilized CFP's who may as well all be the same person, giving the same advice.
Total Stock Market Index, Total International Stock Market Index, Total Bond Market ll Index, Total International Bond Market Index. If you work here, you understand.
