Pros
You will get experience to move on elsewhere.
Cons
This is an extremely weird company to interview and work for. My interviewer was very transparent about what I was getting into, but whoa, this company really tries to be tight-knit because it's a proprietorship/family-business owned by a single woman. But a lot of their company incentives and what the company forced you to do is really intrusive on your life. You'll have no life with this job, it's that bad and stressful. This is a tiny Brantford company filled to the brim with workers desperate for jobs. The usual kind of workers are chemistry and chemical engineers who are entry-level who just can't find anything else and have to commute from 100km away like from Toronto and such. Here's some of my criticisms of the company. 1. It's a very small company even though they ship products around the world, this one tiny Brantford/Brant location is stuffed to the brim with people even though the building is so tiny. Because of the region though, most of the workers are of only a "certain demographic". I'm biracial but look Asian, and when I walked around the building to get in I passed through many smoking workers just plain giving me dirty looks. 2. This company is small, but they force a lot of practices onto you. The problem with working for a small company is that you'll need to work very, very long shifts, especially in an entry-level position. A regular work week that was supposed to be 40 hours per week turns easily into 12+ hours per day for five days. You have to literally deal with everyone and do whatever anyone wants. The owner of the entire business also walks around regularly and if you don't brown nose directly to her, you will actually be fired quickly. Think of kitchen nightmares, but if kitchen nightmares was a pharmaceutical company. I feel bad because the current owner inherited the business from her parents, and she really is kind of running the business into the ground with nepotism and cronyism. For example, one of the parts of the interview process is actually getting several of the best candidates and having them do a group interview with the owner of the business. The owner of the business then chooses whomever she wants to be employed. It just ends up turning nasty really quickly and it ends up being a game of who can brown nose to her the most - no technical skills etc, just need to list whatever hobbies she likes and you're set, it's really terrible. 3. This place really is horrible to work at. Everybody hates the business mutually, and you can see that everybody puts on a fake face and deals with it because they have to support themselves or their kids. Everybody lies and there is barely any transparency. There is an extremely high turnover for a reason, your work is really not appreciated. If anything, this company will hire entry-level people to take the blame when the work goes wrong. One of the high-up managers literally told me, "I want to have blaring alarms ringing and I want to sit back in my chair and let you take care of it!" You might think that in the case of a rare emergency then you'll have to put in extra hours, but no, problems occur very frequently and you will stay overnight very often. They have a lot of problems with when inspectors come in and when it's time for renewing their accreditations like ISO because of how terrible the business is. 4. So let's talk about those company perks! For an entry-level position here you can expect 5 days PTO, no vision coverage. Takes a long time, 6 months for benefits, they're probably planning on increasing it due to high turnover. Starts off at very low RRSP coverage, and that only applies after a year or so, you need 5 years to just get the usually 1-2% matching. The weirdest one though is how they force you to have a week off because the facility closes the week during December holidays, but they force you to work an extra hour a day for the preceding months, from September and October onwards to December. Wow. 5. I don't know what they're trying to do. They're trying to "make their own employees". I was trying to tell my interviewer about my work experience, and he literally cut me off, saying, "I don't care about your work experience, I don't want someone with years of experience, I want someone I can mold into this position." They also badly want to retain their employees because of how bad it is, and I was practically laughing at the interviewer when they said they were trying to get someone who was planning to work here for at least 20 years. I mean, I'm a recent graduate and all, and this was one of the only interviews I was able to secure. After looking through other reviews and listened to what other people were saying, it makes sense why I was able to get it - because nobody else wants to work at this company. They're extremely desperate to find workers, but they actually do get a lot of desperate candidates - the issue is that they end up finding people who are desperate, but as soon as those people are able to secure better positions they run off, leaving the company with a lack of employee retention. Sadly, this company is mostly just the owner riding off the coattails of her parents, if I was in her shoes, I'd probably do the same thing and have a cushy life employing desperate chemistry/chemical engineering graduates.