Pros
I earned valuable experience in the staffing industry that helped propel my career and land a new job with a much better work environment. You will learn everything as a recruiter here--sourcing, cold calling, resume reviewing and editing, screening, interviewing, paperwork including new hire docs, timecards, how to hire and fire people. You will have the opportunity to move up quickly within the company because of high turnover.
Kontras
Recruiters are not treated well at KeyStaff, and overall, employees are treated poorly. Examples listed below. Few paid holidays. Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve are not paid holidays, even though many of KeyStaff's own clients are closed on these days. In my experience, all employees that did not take vacation time for these days came to work in a poor mood and not much work was accomplished (and not much was needed to be done, since most clients were not working). It really brought down morale around the office, and seemed counter-productive. Also, most people pause their job searches around the Holidays, so few calls were answered and appointments became no-shows. The company requires business professional dress, which is fine, but the atmosphere is not business professional. In Austin, the owner rarely spoke to employees while passing in the hallway or copy room (it is a small office), and employees were micromanaged to the max. This was a top-down problem. My immediate manager was wonderful, but she was forced to work many, many extra hours and took a lot of criticism for things that were out of her control. She was then forced to further micromanage her direct reports due to pressure from above. Hours: The standard hours were 7:45am-5pm, with an hour lunch break. This hour lunch break was rarely a reality. Often, employees were expected to either work through lunch or stay late (or both) to keep up with work load. All employees are salaried, so there is no chance for OT. Also, employees are expected to be available at all times. Recruiters were expected to take their laptops home every night and weekend in case something happened in the evening or over the weekend, which was frequent. You never felt like you were truly "off work." PTO: All employees started with 10 days of PTO, which is fair and standard. However, you could only use PTO in increments of full day or half day. You were not allowed to take 2 hours of PTO to go to the doctor or something like that, you had to use 4 or 8. This is a bit silly, since often times appointments do not last 4 hours, but might be longer than an hour lunch break. Also, when I worked there, you had to ask accounting for the number of hours you had accrued for vacation-it was not listed on your pay stub or easily accessible. This was really frustrating for both accounting and the employees. There was even an instance when vacation time was applied to the wrong employee's account, and it was not discovered until months later. This would have been easily avoidable if the information were readily available for all employees. Bonus structure: This is for recruiters specifically. I believe the sales bonus structure was pretty fair when I worked there, but it was extremely difficult for recruiters to make a bonus, or a bonus of a significant amount. Recruiters were also punished by the system if the sales people did not bring in enough jobs for them to fill, or if they all had low mark-ups or low rates. Few recruiters ever made a sizable bonus, and if they did, it was not consistent. This was very bad for morale. KeyStaff makes you think it will be easy to reach these goals when you start, but you quickly discover that this is not not the case. Salaries: Salaries varied GREATLY when I worked at KS. Recruiters salaries did not seem to be based on anything significant. Employees with the same years of experience and education often made differing amounts, with no explanation. It was extremely frustrating and made morale even worse. It's one thing if everyone in the same position with the same experience is being paid poorly or a fair amount, but this was definitely not the case. Also, during my time at KS, there was a lot of rain in Austin, and part of the building flooded. There was a leak where the recruiters and sales team sat, and the carpet would get soaked (this happened on multiple occasions) and smell terribly. The smell would linger for days, and several employees even experienced headaches and felt sick to their stomaches. The owners did nothing about this, other than open a door to air out the room, set out a few fans, and try to get the foundation problem fixed--they never replaced the carpet or even checked for mold. With the terrible smell and the fact that it flooded several times (sometimes on weekends or overnight, so it sat soaking for many hours), I'm pretty sure there was an issue with the carpet. The employees complained and asked for it to be checked for mold, but nothing was ever done during my time there. There are many, many more things I could say, but I can't go on forever. One last example: In my time at KS, there was an employee that regularly argued with other employees, recruited with shady tactics (poaching candidates, etc), and generally made the work environment tense and uncomfortable for those around her. But this employee had great metrics, and was never reprimanded by the owners, even though her manager recommended it. It was one example of how no matter how hard the employees tried, or their manager, the upper-management made things very difficult. In speaking with many of my colleagues (who are also past-employees, as KS has VERY high turnover!), we all agreed that working at KS made us feel undervalued, discouraged, and was an overall very negative experience. Even if you take the money factor out and the negatives associated with staffing (temps not showing up to work, etc), it was still a poor office environment to work in. If you are a staffing company, you should at least be trying to fix your high-turnover problems.
