Pros
Good benefits, good PTO, etc. Great place to start a career, especially in the UPDP pipeline programs....specialty lines are particularly good and are known across the industry as some of the best. While trivial at face value, some of the newer initiatives (Dress for Your Day, etc) are actually nice perks. The customer centric "value add" model is nice to buy into vs just price and terms. Specialty lines are arguably the value leaders of their respective markets. BU management wants to win and drives hard to put initiatives in place to do so. It can be a lot, but there are lots of tools to bring to market to differentiate.
Cons
Elephant in the room: TRV is known for the "Travelers Discount", paying employees up to 20% below market and brag about it in leadership meetings. BU leadership wonders why people leave yet will jawbone ceaselessly about "employee engagement & retention" while doing absolutely nothing differently or adjusting comp to close the gap. The running joke amongst the rank-and-file is the only way to make more is to leverage an offer from a competitor. The comp process is a joke and a black box nobody can figure out up to the Sr. VP level. It's been a "tough comp year" with "the bonus pool is down" for the last decade despite management locally and c-suite both telling employees how good of a job we're doing and how TRV earnings are good. The messaging is completely different public vs. mid-Feb and while management is blissfully ignorant of that fact the little people grumble amongst themselves. Nobody can figure out how to quantify how performance translates to bonus; the inputs are extremely fluffy and left to local management's discretion...asking management direct questions just gets platitudes and redirection. Each experienced person that leaves a BU is essentially replaced by a new hire trainee, fewer and fewer experienced people are remaining in specialty BUs and more and more relationships with customers and agents are held at the executive levels making lower level people administrators of the business which is disheartening. The company will say things like "we have a great pipeline and good continuity" but scramble when someone senior leaves and take MONTHS to fill a customer facing executive or management role, even for a planned retirement. Experienced people are told they're "in the continuity plan" but nothing happens when the position opens and the people who were told they were in line for the next step suddenly are not. Our own customers have shared at conferences how they pipeline and identify talent for management and TRV has taken zero from that. The hiring process is atrocious and should be completely revamped. Entry level or experienced people both suffer the months-long delays, bureaucracy, ghosting, "it's with HR I need to wait for them" excuses. RVP and CUO level managers all hate the process; the stories of how screwed up things get are unbelievable for a company this big.