Pros
There are a lot of fantastic people that work at Pinnacle. My team members were some of the kindest and most perseverant people I had ever met. I truly believe that I have made some life-long friendships here. I am fairly young in my career and I was able to make decisions and improve processes that really impacted the company. Pinnacle also has a lot of internal groups that allow for employees to connect with one another. They make it very easy to make friends at work.
Cons
Oh goodness, where do I begin. I have been at Pinnacle for almost 1 year. 2 weeks ago I put in my notice to transition and was walked out by HR one day before my last day for no reason. In fact, all that was said in my exit meeting that happened mid-afternoon on a Thursday was "You have done a really great job there last 2 weeks and we are very thankful for your hard work, but we are going to go ahead and push your last day up to right now." This made it so I was unable to say goodbye to any of the friends that I had made or thank any of the mentors I had developed. I made 4 job offers this week and had already had 2 people accept - I did not stop working hard at my job over these last 2 weeks and I really do not know why I was dismissed. This also meant that I was not able to have the exit interview with the VP of my department before my last day to provide feedback on why I was leaving. In 2018 our recruiting team, made up of about 5-6 people, was responsible for hiring over 350+ employees. During that year I was responsible for hiring about 75 people. How did we manage to do this? Most of my career at Pinnacle I worked somewhere between 50-75 hours a week. Mind you, I was a salaried employee and was never paid overtime for my efforts. I can count on one hand how many times I was actually able to take a lunch break. I expressed to my lead multiple times that I was overwhelmed and stressed. In return, I was told that I had the most bandwidth on my team and had to just push through it. I left my previous company to come to Pinnacle because I was told the work life balance would be better. I actually took a significant pay cut to come to Pinnacle. However, it turned out to be a lie - very high expectations were placed on the recruiting team and after seeing another recruiter get fired for performance I was terrified of what would happen if I didn't continue meeting expectations. I am married and have a lot of health issues that require me to make sure I have ample time outside of work for doctor's appointments, rest, etc. About 6 months into working at Pinnacle I had to get on anxiety and depression medication because I was so stressed and not sleeping well. There were several contributing factors that led to my lack of work life balance. One, positions were never fully vetted by management - we would be told one day that a position was our number priority, work really hard on it, and then it would suddenly close or disappear because there wasn't actually a PO in place or management decided they need to better train their current employees before bringing anyone else on. We also had little to no recruiting outlets. All of the recruiters on my team had a LinkedIn Lite seat, which meant they could message 30 people a month. Once we ran out of those we would email a list of profiles to our lead, she would message them, and then schedule a phone screen for us. This process extended the timeframe for us to reach a candidate significantly. In addition, with a LinkedIn Lite seat you are unable to see who all is "Open to New Opportunities". Therefore, we are just blindly messaging people and hoping some of them are looking. LinkedIn was our only recruiting resource - we did not have access to Indeed, Monster, Career Builder, Zip Recruiter, etc. At the company I am going to I will have access to all of those and it is a significantly smaller organization. All of our processes for documenting our candidates and scheduling our interviews was completely fragmented and made it so highly-skilled recruiters spent a large chunk of their day scanning, filing, etc. Unlike most companies we really did not get a lot of qualified applicants to our job - we had to go out and recruit on LinkedIn for almost every position we had open. I have never really had an interest in leading people or serving as a manager. I had done it several times in various roles throughout school and wasn't a big fan. Because of that, I was interested in moving into a Recruiting Specialist role on our team where I would be responsible for our more difficult to fill positions. However, I was told that was not going to be an option by my lead. Therefore, I decided to look elsewhere. After getting an "exceeding expectations" performance review I told my lead that I was interested in moving into a different role at the company that allowed for greater work-life balance. She discouraged me from doing that because she said I really did have a gift for recruiting and would hate to see it go to waste. I was also not awarded a salary increase for my performance and no one at the company received bonuses in 2018. While I had a positive experience with the performance review process none of my other teammates did. I was the only one on my team told I "exceeded expectations" in 2018 even though we hired 80 more people then asked to for the year. In fact, we were brought to the founder's home for dinner one night to thank us for all of our hard work and were recognized in front of the entire organization for our efforts during our company-wide monthly meeting. There were so many times at Pinnacle where we received mixed messages on our performance for upper management . I think the thing that disturbed me the most at Pinnacle was the way that management treated their employees. I had one co-worker that was placed on a Correction Performance Plan after 3 months of working there even though she was meeting the metrics and expectations set by management. The same coworker was written up for a metric that none of us had ever heard of before and changed from being 50% on Friday to 75% on Monday because our lead realized she was in fact meeting the metric. The craziest thing about all of this was that our lead deleted over 400 lines of data where this information was being pulled from and skewed all of our numbers that upper management was judging our performance on. Overall, I really wanted to like working at Pinnacle. I truly love recruiting and I really did love my team members. My first few months at the company were fantastic. However, everything took a sharp turn this year for the worse and a lot of really sketchy things started going down. If you would have asked me 3 months ago if you should come work at Pinnacle I would have said yes. However, I don't think anyone should be interested in coming to work there. Management does not seem to care about their employees and appears to be constantly trying to cover their own back. I sacrificed a lot for my job at Pinnacle because I knew how important it was to the company, but in the end that doesn't really seemed to have been recognized. I am sad about how things ended at Pinnacle and I wish that I could have had my last day to say my goodbyes.
