Williams-Sonoma Reviews

Current Employee – been working at Williams-Sonoma part-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Love the associates I work with and their eagerness to help customers. Great associate discount for their products. Wouldn't want to work for any other retailer with similar products.

Cons – Love my manager, but she needs help keeping signage current for displayed products. Some displays not functioning properly, such as salt and pepper mills, displaying products without all their parts, such as oven racks. I realize that's because of fear of customer stealing, but there has to be a way to display products better.

Advice to Senior Management – Keep this manager by all means. She is a very hard worker and eager to please customers and employees.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Williams-Sonoma full-time for more than 10 years

Pros – When I started Pottery Barn was more like Cost Plus. There was plenty to be done and if you could take stuff on you were given the ok and eventually rewarded. Changed careers there twice with support of management. Very pro female environment.

Cons – Very pro female environment. Slow to hire. Slow to give promotions. Not great at listening. Higher management thinks they know what the customer wants and doesn't listen good enough to new ideas and feedback.

Advice to Senior Management – Listen

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Williams-Sonoma part-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Great people to work with

Cons – Low salary and unrealistic expectations

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Williams-Sonoma part-time for less than a year

Pros – great products and great associates

Cons – Corporate asks for the impossible. As an associate you are expected to carry out too many tasks at once while delivering amazing customer service. It cannot all be done well! And the pay is TERRIBLE

Advice to Senior Management – Stop having so many meetings. Come into the stores and see what's really going on. So many changes are happening and they're not helping the stores at all.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Williams-Sonoma full-time for more than a year

Pros – Great discount on all the family of brands. Really smart and friendly coworkers who were a pleasure to work with.

Cons – It's hard to grow your career with this company. Very little promotions and when there is it's more of a small pay raise than more responsibility. We supposedly had one of our best years in 2012, but there has been a hiring freeze and many benefits taken away. Why would WS communicate to the team that we're doing awesome and then punish us? There's also very little perks and benefits to working here except for the great employee discount. We used to have 2pm leave on Fridays but that was just recently taken away. What are they thinking? Everyone is going to begin to leave and take advantage of the tech boom in San Francisco and leave for companies who have great benefits. We also acquired and developed new brands in 2012, but instead of hiring more people everyone had to take on additional work and I think the quality of work is suffering because everyone is barely scraping by.

Advice to Senior Management – Upper management and the brand presidents are too hands on and micro manage their team and this trickles down to everyone in the company. It's very frustrating when management constantly does whatever it takes to make sales regardless of thinking about the customer experience! They need to back off and listen to their people (the experts) and let us do our job the way we think is best for the company. Of course there needs to be guidance from management, but I feel like it's gotten to the point where we don't feel like our voice is heard.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Williams-Sonoma full-time for more than a year

Pros – Everyone's smart and competent and it's a good place to work so people stay a long time.

Cons – Hard to branch out into combined strategic + analytic functions.

Advice to Senior Management – The CEO needs to stop managing in a reactionary manner. Work from home was just cancelled out of a knee-jerk 'feeling' that people are taking advantage of this option. It's a slap-in-the-face to those who used this policy to balance extreme productivity with life's demands. Have more faith in your charges who are already working around the clock to do the best job possible.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Williams-Sonoma full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Multi billion dollar corporation, 6+ various different brands, high pay rates/ hr

Cons – Not an easy copany to grow in (if you have no prior background in your area of interest)

Advice to Senior Management – loss prevention has a flaw....return policy is too flexible.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Williams-Sonoma full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Great discount/Salary above the market average

Cons – Mgmt in distribution and logistics is good old boys club. If you don't fit their demographic, forget about career advancement. HR turns out to be a puppet to the other parts of the organization.

Advice to Senior Management – More cooperation between Memphis and corporate.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Williams-Sonoma full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Love the small business mentality of West Elm, but has the support of Williams-Sonoma. Great career pathing and training. Used to have Summer Fridays all year!

Cons – No more year-round Summer Fridays. :( Felt like a lot of promotion talk, but no action. Small bonuses and small raises. Hard to move up within and lots of turnover.

Advice to Senior Management – Need to maintain employees and make it easier to have a long-term career with the company - I would have loved to stay longer, but it was time for me to move upwards and onwards.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Williams-Sonoma full-time for more than 8 years

Pros – If you like working hard this is the place to be. Lot of opportunities and lots to get done.

Cons – This place is always trying to do too much in too short a time and half the costs. So extremely challenging environment. There is never a dull or a lull moment.

Advice to Senior Management – No knee jerk reactions. Have a plan and stick to it

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company