First and foremost, there is a distinct separation and preferential treatment between operations employees and sales employees - this is most clearly seen within the various reviews on Glassdoor itself. While operations employees are voicing their opinions, sales employees are (likely, judging by the existing comp structures) compensated to post overwhelmingly positive reviews.
All decisions by upper management are driven by a sales perspective. This company prides itself on growing year to year, but is not afraid to outright lie to prospects to bring in new customers. The operations teams are tasked with mitigating damage from incorrect expectations on a daily basis.
This distinction can be seen in the fact most of the executive level of management is drawn from sales staff. The executive leadership has never worked on the operations side of things and really witnessed the ramifications of this sales-driven perspective
New clients are forced to pay extraordinary additional costs due to flaws in system capability. As an account manager (Paycom Service Specialist), you are both expected to reset client expectations following sales and punished for client dissatisfaction in the fashion of lost compensation. Existing clients, who are often fed up with the nickel and dime approach, will complain and middle management will waive fees without question. Front line operations employees are still expected to generate revenue from these items despite the willingness to waive fees.
Despite claiming this is a company who knows how to grow, management consistently shows poor decision making when dealing with emerging issues. Major company policies can be re-written a dozen times in six months, and expectations are unclear while additional responsibilities are piled upon account managers, without relief.
At the most recent year-end party, CEO Chad Richison stated that more than 50% of the workforce has not worked for Paycom for more than 18 months. This shows on all levels. The few with experience are responsible for carrying the others who are feeding the constant, extremely high turnover.
Inter-departmental support is non-existent. All additional tasks are dumped on service specialists, and while the product base has doubled in the past two years client capacity and bonus structure has not changed in a decade. When a new set of responsibilities arrives, upper management does not consider the actual ramifications of their choices - they just say "the PSD group can do it."
Product development is over-ambitious - Paycom will pride itself on an unprecedented monthly feature release schedule. This shows itself in the product never being fully tested and frequent, extreme software bugs. Often employees will not know what is being released, or at what time, or to what extent - yet account managers will be held accountable for any client dissatisfaction regarding the changes within the core software product that may or may not do what they were intended, while potentially breaking the previous function of the program.
The lowest level of management at the individual team level has no ability to impact decision making, they operate as swing specialists. Despite nominally being team leaders, in most cases they spend their time hypothesizing on ways things could be approved but never taking suggestions to management, and only step in to client issues to assure the client that their unwarranted demands, often outside of the service Paycom claims to provide, are justified. Due to the outpaced bonus structure, this results in loss of compensation to most employees.
The often flouted year-end party is a disappointing replacement for competitive bonuses. An open bar and hour long show from a band that registered on the b-list ten years ago is not adequate celebration of your employees offsetting poor executive decisions and misguided technology decisions. Instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a party that dissolves into alcohol abuse and brawling, divvy that money out in profit-sharing programs.
The company knows and understands it is a stepping stone to other opportunities - this is why training is limited to Paycom-specific items or non-transferable motivational classes. The company will not recognize continuing education or individual attempts to further one's career outside of the extremely narrow and linear progression up the Paycom ladder. While this was effective when the company was much smaller due to the high rate of employees leaving the company, as it expands it causes more employees to run into a dead end after two years of employment.
When it comes to promotions, management is more concerned with finding yes-men (or diversity hires) than finding effective leaders. While most negative reviews bring this up, I only wanted to touch on it - this is not the biggest con by a large margin, but needs to be mentioned.
For a single, young person immediately out of college this job can be phenomenal. No person above 25 can maintain this for more than a year. No person with a family can have only Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, and New Year's Day as their only days off during the holiday season. Nobody with basic levels of self-respect can accept being consistently lied to by their employers without assuming their unquestionably large paycheck is buying them off.
For those interviewing, you can make your own decision - but if it sounds too good to be true, it is. The image Paycom tries so hard to put out to the world is, in fact, too good to be true.
