Pros
* You'll meet some cool people here, as with any job. * Since their contract locations are scattered throughout the country, they should be able to find you a location close to your home... though even this can be dodgy (see below).
Cons
Contract security is, as those who have worked it know, a generally bad experience. Securitas has a few reasons for it. First, recruiting is both dishonest, undiscerning, and unprofessional. When I first applied for Securitas, I chose a job location that was right in the town I was living in. The recruiter told me they didn't actually have an opening there, that was just to get recruits. Huh?! Isn't that bait-and-switch? Also, when I say to you they'll hire anybody... I mean they'll hire anybody. Covered in tattoos and piercings? Not only will they not tell you that you might have to cover them up or take them off for your position, but they'll send you to a high-end corporate site! Long hair on a man? They won't even bother to warn you that you might have to trim it or put it in a ponytail. Basically, they're more interested in meeting quotas than hiring people who will actually be fitting for the job. Finally, the people at the hiring location were rude, and some of the materials made no sense. For example, I was filling out a questionnaire, and there was a question about COVID that had clearly been typed up quickly with no reviewing: the first half of the question was completely unrelated to the second half of the question. I showed this to the hiring person to ask for clarification, and she just looked at the first half (ignoring the second) and said it meant what it said. When I pointed out that the second half seemed contradictory, she gave her assistant a look like I was a complete moron. Way to treat your new hires. Second, their supply and demand just doesn't care. You can send them very specific uniform requests, and they'll send you the completely wrong stuff. For example, I requested a winter baseball cap (no mesh) and a summer baseball cap (with mesh); I got a winter baseball cap and a beanie. I even showed my site supervisor my request to make sure I wasn't unclear, and he fully understood it. Another example is I sent a very specific size for the belt, and got one that didn't even fit me. I can't imagine how much money Securitas loses every year because they don't inventory well. Third, employee discipline is at an all time low. Guards came in for their shift completely out of uniform. Guards regularly came in late. Guards would run away to quiet parts of the site and never do any work. Guards would never go on patrols, yet flat out lie on their activity reports that they did. Guards regularly forgot their badges, and never had any other form of ID on them. This was all provable and often could be seen on camera, and yet nothing was ever done about it. It makes the guards that do their work stop caring, since you can apparently refuse to follow your post orders and still get paid the same amount. Oh yeah, and what happens if a guard becomes TOO MUCH of a problem? Do they get fired? Nope! You just get moved to another site! That's right, let's have SOMEONE ELSE deal with them! This doesn't even cover the generally ridiculous environment you'll encounter. People would rather whine, gossip, and/or complain than solve problems, and if they ever got disciplined, it was everyone else's fault except their own. Finally, upper management is completely unhelpful. Our upper management was basically MIA, and a lot of jobs that were required of him were thrusted upon the site supervisor out of necessity, meaning our site supervisor had to do more work than was required. This got even worse when our site supervisor quit due to some on-site drama. Once again, upper management thrust his job on another employee without promoting them, ran away on vacation, and refused to respond to any phone calls or emails. Literally everyone on the site tried to reach out to him, and he almost never replied (except maybe once or twice). Everyone was wondering when we would get a site supervisor, but were left completely in the dark by upper management. In fact, it was well over a month after the site supervisor, and we were still left leaderless. I eventually left, and even at the time I left, we were without a site supervisor.
