Pros
Working with some young and driven people, networking
Cons
Working at Enterprise was the worst decision of my life. I want to give a full, detailed account of my experience so that others can make their decision before joining this hell-hole of a job/company. About me: I am in my 30s, and I made a very thorough decision to quit my job and join Enterprise solely because I wanted to go for a career change in sales. I knew the pay wasn’t going to be great (about $17 an hour) but they sold me on their Management program and promotional opportunities. Starting off, you apply online and a Talent Specialist calls you in for your first interview very soon after. This first step is more of a hook to get you to want to join the company and not so much of an interview. She’ll talk about how you can grow anywhere you want in the company by putting in your time and how many great friends you’ll make. She’ll tell you the salaries you can make in each position, but not telling you about the 12+ hours you’ll work in order to make that. The Management Trainee position is an entry-level job that requires a Bachelor’s degree with none or very little experience – perhaps waiting tables, showing leadership examples in a frat/sorority, or being competitive with your grades. That’s basically it. Next, they schedule a day for you to go to the branch that has the opening and you sit there for an hour and observe. After that the Branch Manager calls you in for an interview. Depending on who is running that branch, this step can either be more thorough or super chill. For me, I have over 10 years of experience compared to what they normally look for, so it’s obvious I would get the job. Then you get scheduled to meet the Area Manager who basically asks you the same things. My last 2 interviews took about 1 hour each, because I asked a lot of questions to make sure that this was the right move for me. However, in all 3 steps in this process, no one CLEARLY told me what the job really entails, what a normal workday looks like, or what your schedule will be. They just dance around your questions and talk about all the positives or promoting and a lot of gibberish. I think it’s all a marketing ploy that they do to get people to join and then they get stuck, brainwashed, and too tired to find a new job. Let me be blunt on what you will do day-to-day: You will physically be at work for about 12 hours a day, 5-6 days a week (with an hour lunch & no option to take a 30, and no 2 10 min breaks which is illegal!!!), you have to dress in nice business clothes (suits, blazers, work dresses etc), wash cars in the heat or rain by hand and if your branch doesn’t have a hose, well then you will be washing with rags and buckets (on average I washed about 5-10 a day), drive around several hours a day picking up/dropping off customers, taking cars to get oil changes, picking up cars from other branches, being rushed by your managers to drive fast because we’re always in a rush (yes if you get a ticket you will have to pay for it), then having to put on a happy face to customers and up-sell them on insurance they don’t need or not fully explaining it so you can SCAM them into getting your sales numbers up. Also, customers are allowed to reserve cars no matter what the inventory is. For example, your branch could have absolutely no cars available, but a customer will reserve it and come in and you will have to scramble around calling other branch locations to find one even if it's like an hour away. But yes! It's going to be your fault and get yelled at because Enterprise lets people book whatever and whenever they want! Work/life balance? Forget about it. You’ll be so drained from your 12 hour days that all you want to do on your time off is sleep or catch up on errands. But don’t worry, almost everyone you’ll work with hates it too so at least you’ll have people to complain with. Oh and you wanna get promoted? After about a year of going through this hell, now you get a whole $1 raise an hour AND you get to work even LONGER HOURS! Yay! *rolls eyes* I want to go a bit further into this SCAM: there are 4 optional protection (insurance) that are offered. However, instead of explaining to customers each of the 4 items, I was trained by all 3 of my managers to just BS and sell in packages starting from the highest, and as I go lower to act like I’m giving them a discount, but I’m really just taking off 1 item. Oh and also to never show them the tablet so that they don’t see anything until they’re signing. Sure, you don’t have to sell this way, but good luck on getting promoted because it’s ALL based on your sales numbers. Now an interesting thing happened before I quit – Enterprise got audited by a 3rd party company and what they discovered is how we were scamming customers as mentioned above. They got in trouble and they made all of us stop doing that and sell the right way by explaining each of the 4 items line by line. I thought this was great, however it really made me question the integrity of this company. Do you really want to be working for a company that has been scamming customers since 1957? And they're now only changing because they got caught? How do you think that reflects on how they will treat you as an employee? Think about it. I talked to the Area Manager about how much I don’t respect Enterprise for being unethical and how misleading the whole interview process was. Her only advice was to switch branch locations. Lol! I want to let you know that THERE ARE MUCH BETTER OPTIONS OUT THERE. There are companies that don’t force you to do mandatory overtime every day, they treat their employees with respect and kindness, they don’t encourage you to do unethical things, they give you your legal rest breaks and don’t treat you like animals. You don’t obtain a Bachelor’s to do manual labor. You can see for yourself by how high the turnover is. Major red flag. I hated my life during the time I worked here and complained about it every single day. All the managers are in their early 20s where this is their 1st or 2nd real job out of college. Do you really think they have good management skills? They encourage you to sell sell sell and then when a customer problem arises, management steps in by waiving everything – free rental days, free gas, free upgrades etc but forget about getting hooked up when YOU want to rent a car lol. It’s literally cheaper to rent a car through Costco or Expedia than using your employee discount. This company is such a joke.
