Hewitt Associates Llc

 

2

34

Matt R.

Wilmette, IL

Note : My experience is based off when I was there in 06, things may have or may have not changed...from what I was told from others things have only gone downhill from there.

Depending on the position at Hewitt, you are either A: treated like garbage but paid well
or B: treated like garbage.

I worked here a Customer Service in 06 and this is the typical Customer Service churn location. They force people to abide by a schedule so strict that they even schedule bathroom breaks. Not to mention scripts, and excessive monitoring of your calls "for performance" (so that they can fire you if necessary and cover their legal asses).

Lets go further back: The training is completely useless. It teaches you the absolute most rudimentary basics to handle their systems but 90% of that does nothing for you when it comes to real world work. Everything is unspoken/you won't figure out until the situation comes up. No amount of knowledge of lotus, sametime, or anything else will help you in this aspect of understanding their call center system. It has an incredibly non-intuitive interface, and I am great with computers and figured things out fine after about 2 weeks but many people couldn't even figure it out in 3 months.

3 months, however, is their "churn point". See after 3 months, if they like you (aka you work hard enough when treated like scum), you get hired on. If not, then maybe you get hired on after a 2nd review....and if not, well good luck nice seeing ya! Yes, they hire you as temp like that, and churn just like that. Some people have come through 2 and 3 times because it's hard to just find a job again when you don't know when you're leaving the current job. Sometimes people are asked to extend past the 3 months, and sometimes they aren't.

However, the place is not 100% bad. It does have 2 (and only 2) odd things going for it:

1: excellent cafeteria. Sushi available every day
2: attractive people work there...it's some kind of odd coincidence

I've known people who worked in higher up positions at Hewitt (people making 200grand+ a year) and they also expressed a discontentment towards how they were treated by Hewitt's corporate personnel. Hewitt is the embodiment of everything Office Space resents...red staplers, bosses who talk like Lumberg, its all there.

In short, if you need money, work there. If you plan to stay long term there, I pity you with all of my heart and soul. If you live for structure (down to the minute) in your schedule, and 24/7 answering phones with a structured system to work by, you might enjoy it.

After 5 years in customer service people make around 40-44 grand (as of 07, a friend of mine who still works there). When I started as temping, it was $15/hr. Not bad for customer service at the time.

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