Procom Reviews

Pros

Procom hires really strong individual contributors who do good work and are great team players. Yonge & Eglinton location is great - lots of amenities like subway, restaurants, grocery stores, movie theatres, shopping all within 2-blocks of office. Work/life balance is possible so long as you make it so. There is no overtime/comp time allowed, but if you have a lot of work to do, no one will stop you from staying late or working through your lunch to complete it. But no one will stop you from taking your allotted breaks and leaving on time, either -- it's entirely up to you to stick to your schedule and keep your professional and personal time separate.

Cons

Management does not care about employees. A manager once said to me, "as long as we can get a year out of the person, then we're happy," and continued to say they don't expect most people to stay more than 1-2 years. There are no incentives to keep employees -- benefits are minimal, pay is abysmal, time off meets the legally required minimums and nothing more. Despite what is advertised and what management shares in interview process, there is very little room for growth because it's a very horizontal organization -- lots of individual contributors, then just a few team leads, who report directly into upper management. Individual contributors are fired/laid off often and without much warning, and with surprising regularity, creating an environment of demoralized and sometimes fearful employees. Nearly everyone is miserable, and management does not make any attempt to change the problems so people are happy and retention rates go up. (Of note, I am not one of the people who got fired. Like so many others, I worked tirelessly to find another role in an organization that cares about its people and resigned the moment I found it.) There are some team leads who are not suited to supervisory roles, and treat their team poorly. Some leads can be downright abusive. Upper management and HR are unwilling to do more than lend a sympathetic ear. The Executive/Management team has worked together for many years and is a very insulated clique that leaves no room for anyone or anything but their own egos. This affects the entire organization, from lengthy and uninformative staff meetings where they can pat their own backs in front of an audience, to implementing defective software systems because they don't want to lose face and admit that there is a problem with it and it's not ready to launch. For a staffing and payroll company, Procom is completely incompetent with payroll. Between the above-mentioned defective software system and the incompetent Accounts Payable team, contractors regularly encounter payment problems (not paid on time, incorrect payment amounts that can take Procom weeks and even months to resolve). They also make errors on their own employees' payments particularly when an employee has anything other than their usual payment (e.g., first and last cheques, bonuses, etc.). Personal time is never listed on the paystub for employees, and once you leave the company, you lose access to the system with your time-off history, and the company refuses to give you a copy for your records or to show that outstanding vacation time is paid out correctly on your final cheque. The CEO and COO are father and son, and this leads to a lot of ugly politics as the son tries to deceive is father about various aspects of the business, and keeps others from telling the CEO the truth about the state of business. Communication within the company is at best very opaque and not timely (e.g., announcing changes to the management team weeks after the change has occurred), and often nonexistent.