QL is not a good place for a prospective employee, because they are moving rapidly towards automation. This year alone roughly 28% of underwriting has been fired in two mass-firing waves. The people that were fired were anyone that had been written up more than once for the same offense, even if the offenses had taken place years and years ago. That's why if you look at other Glassdoor reviews they say they were targeting seasoned employees, actually it's because if you've been at the company for a long time it's more likely you will have been written up more times. Admittedly some of the write ups were for stupid things, such as being a few minutes late, working even one minute after 8pm, or working on more than one loan at the same time. By doing it this way, QL was able to label the firings "for cause" as opposed to what they were (layoffs) to avoid paying unemployment. Another group was laterally demoted to a totally different role in the company, because there was no one left to fire. The reason they are doing this is because QL is going all out towards automation, in other words they are actively working to take our job functions and have a computer do them instead. As they improve the technology, more job functions are taken away and they need less of us. It got to the point that early in the year there was no work to go around, which is why people were fired & moved.
If you think this is the end, think again... This isn't a secret. The stated goal of senior leadership is to further reduce our job functions by 70% by April 2019. Nevermind that the technology is legitimately terrible and, in the words of senior leadership, "half-baked", because the current presidential admin has loosened regulations to the point that QL can get away with selling bad loans because the government isn't going to notice anyway. Likewise, income is random because we no longer get paid on quality (nor is our work audited anymore), instead our bonuses come from random drawings based entirely upon chance.
Today QL is in quite a pickle because everyone who can be fired "for cause" has already been fired-- literally. They have spent the months since the culling making our life miserable-- eliminating flexible hours, mandatory one hour lunch breaks, strict enforcement of the time clock, removing work from home access, cutting salaries, eliminating bonuses, making it more difficult to get promoted, eliminating company parking, eliminating team meals, mandatory off-site off-hour meetings (IE, requiring employees to meet late at night for 5 hours in a random parking lot in the city of Detroit to "improve morale").. the list goes on. The hope is that we will leave on our own, through attrition. Again, this isn't a secret-- management calls meetings at least once a month specifically to encourage us to apply to different jobs within the company (nevermind that those jobs are all 40%+ paycuts). It doesn't matter if you produce like a rockstar, at this point you're just a cog in the machine to them, and you'll have to ask for permission to take a bathroom break like everyone else.
So no, this is not a great place to work. That should not be a surprise because as you can see if you sort the Glassdoor ratings for Quicken Loans by underwriter, we give them a 1.7, and all of the past reviews are 1 star.
