Pros
Hertz was a great place to learn skills you will implement in your next, better job. As a General Manager you will be responsible for inside and outside sales, logistics management, project management, employee training, planning and managing to a financial business plan as well as the day to day operation of the area as a whole. All of this prepared a couple other Hertz Alum and myself to start our own business. The company generally hires great people who will become good friends due to the hours you will spend together. Although many of the more tenured employees have moved on.
Cons
After 16 years it’s just what the title says “Consistently inconsistent leadership”. Be prepared to have a new VP every couple of months as they change the region maps constantly. I’m not sure what causes this constant reorganization but you can set your watch to it. I suspect it’s back office managers I’m some department trying to justify their employment. You will also be tasked with some “new important initiative” every six weeks or so. On the surface this is fine but each of these new initiatives, whether it be electric cars, cargo vans, box trucks, etc, take away resources from what Hertz should really be concerned with. PROVIDING THE LOWEST MILEAGE, NICEST CARS TO THE CUSTOMER QUICKER AND MORE COURTEOUSLY THAN THE COMPETITION. It is pretty simple. But the “think tank” in Estero is full of 24 year olds who have never rented a car to a customer or even for themselves. They are constantly coming up with new stuff that cost the company a ton of money and adds almost no value. A funny example would be the holiday wraps they put on cars. Hertz will vinyl wrap a Tahoe to look like a christmas present during the holidays. This cost thousands of dollars for each vehicle and you can barely give them away to customers. Who wants to rent a minivan that looks like a candy cane??? That money would be better spent giving Christmas bonuses to the hourly employees who actually work on Christmas Day , even if just a small one . Another con is your bonus plan will change constantly. Not only will it change, but it will often change after the current quarter has started meaning you are flying blind for the first month or so. They will also make it complicated so it’s not easy to track and hard to explain to your employees. I would always ask branch managers from other areas how they thought the bonus plan worked. Almost all had no idea. For their final trick, they’ll cap all the categories so if you really crush it they only pay off to a certain point. Then nothing. I earned the most during my career with Hertz in 2015. The next year they capped bonuses and my total earnings decreased 20%. In the following years my pay was mostly flat. I never made it back to those 2015 numbers. These changes ran off some very good managers. The rest of us hung out hoping it would improve. Learned my first valuable lesson there. Once it’s taken away, it’s never coming back. Speaking of Bonuses, I finished the 2021 calendar year and was given my year end review . Based on this score, you receive a year end bonus. They basically withhold a portion of your quarterly bonuses and pay it out with a multiplier based on your score. Before giving notice I asked multiple people above me what date I would need to work through in order to receive my year end bonus. They all said “if you finish the year, you have earned the money” which made sense. I gave 30 day notice In mid jan of 22 and my final day was in mid Feb 22. When the bonus payment was made in March 22 (another issue with this company, why does it take 3 months to calculate and pay a bonus?) I did not receive my year end bonus which would have been a sizable amount of money. Called my HR business partner and she said “even though you finished 2021 and earned your final performance score you have to be employed at time of bonus payout to actually receive it”. I told her I was told by multiple people, including her, that this was not the case and that I would be paid for my full year of work. The response was “do you have that in writing?” I obviously no longer had access to my hertz emails since I had been gone for a month. I should have sent it to my personal email but I took all of these people at face value and trusted them. Lesson learned. It’s Just a shame that after 16 and 1/2 years you’re treated like this. I gave 30 day notice so that I could train my replacement because I cared about my employees and wanted the area to run smoothly im my absence. I could have certainly just hung out and not done any work until the bonus was paid and no one would have been the wiser. But I wanted to leave on good terms from a company that had been my life since shortly after college graduation. If you plan on working for any car rental company be prepared for long hours, low pay, understaffing, and brief but blistering bouts of stress. If this sounds good to you, go work at Enterprise. They will have all the cons listed above but at least they are not publicly traded. At least they won’t try to jump on the “meme stock” train by attempting to offer 1 Billion in additional shares to the public DURING BANKRUPTCY! And when you’re dealing with your 15th upset customer who booked a minivan you told your pricing guy you didn’t have, at least you’ll be doing it from the comfort of one of the hundreds of brand new offices Enterprise is opening all over the county. I learned a ton during my time. I wanted to leave on a positive note and remember my time fondly. But honestly, the company is a rotting husk of a once great employer. There are still a couple good folks in the higher ranks (actually just one) and I’m hoping he can turn things around. For the sake of all the good folks still working there, and all the customers who still chose Hertz.