Nordstrom reviews

3.5

56% would recommend to a friend

(25,090 total reviews)

Erik B. Nordstrom and Peter E. Nordstrom

70% approve of CEO

47% positive business outlook

Nordstrom has an employee rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 25,090 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Nordstrom employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Retail & Wholesale industry (3.4 stars).

Reviews by job title

25K reviews
1.0
Jul 22, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The location, merchandise discount, very family oriented

Cons

1) The technology used internally is very outdated. The finance systems are old and scrappy and layer after layer of quick fixes. You end up spending more time validating that the data is correct than doing real work. 2) Benefits are nothing special and pay is way under market. They try to promote that they have great benefits, but when you look at around at any other Seattle company, you realize it is a joke. 3) There is a lack of education and experience in a lot of management. There is a need for management training and some external hiring in high leadership experiences. Nordstrom has done a big push to hire externally for SFA and FA positions to get more experience. However this doesn't matter when your managers, vps, svps have worked at Nordstrom most of their careers and aren't willing to look at things in a different way. 4) Work Life Balance all depends on what team you work on. At times it was not good and other times it was fine.

1.0
Jul 7, 2017

If you are not upper management, you are not appreciated here.

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Easy going dress code

Cons

-Favoritism: Jobs have been created for the favorites of the company. Benefits have also been given to favorites including additional time off/working from home. If you are not one of the favorites of upper management, you are treated as though you do not matter at the company. - No discipline: There is no discipline from anyone in upper management. There have been other employees that have broken common HR rules and have continued to work in the company without any disciplinary action (ie: yelling at other employees, attendance discrepancies) - No help in career growth: The company has gotten better about letting employees know of positions within, however the issue with trying to grow your career at Hautelook is upper management. Upper management has said that they will assist you in learning about other positions, but once you ask, they end up making you feel bad about taking time away from your normal work day to go shadow. On the other end, there are certain departments that you reach out to to shadow, and they don't respond to your emails or requests. If the company is so willing to help your career growth, they should be promoting processes across the board. - Pay: The pay for all hourly positions is pathetic. You are expected to go above and beyond your position duties, but you are not paid out to those expectations. Whether you are on the creative team or on production team, the pay as an hourly employee does not match to the work that is done. - Turnover rate: I have never experienced a higher turnover rate than at this company. At one point there was 4-5 employees in production that were quitting and moving on to other companies because they were so dissatisfied here. If the high turnover rate is not evident enough to the company, I'm not sure if anything will ever change. - Drama: There is so much drama. I know that the company cannot always control what is said, but they are responsible for how they deal with the aftermath. There is nothing that is ever done. - Management: As stated earlier, upper management "plays favorites" and will promote employees they like into management positions. This allows for young, inexperienced employees into positions of power. There have been several issues of mismanagement of various departments and the stats show the performance. There has never been any training for managers missing the mark and the issues are never addressed until they are escalated to a point that the department can not recover from.

3.0
Feb 9, 2017

Solid, but not without issues.

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Nordstrom discount is honestly excellent. The work-life balance is also excellent, while still offering solid pay. You'll get paid more at Google or Amazon, but you'll do just fine here salary-wise while actually getting to have a life outside of work and more PTO (than Amazon, at least). The majority of my coworkers are laid back, friendly people whom I enjoy working alongside and learning from. With one or two exceptions. The technology org needed the streamlining that happened over the last year. It was a really unpleasant thing to go through the reorgs as an employee, and morale (my own included) nosedived for a good chunk of 2016, but I do think the org is better off now for having done that. They're making the necessary moves to modernize and bring our tech up to more current standards, and I feel positively about the future for Nordstrom tech in that sense. On the web side, Yuri K has been a bright spot as a director. Tech HR did a review on salaries a few months ago and a lot of people got respectable raises after it was determined that they were making below Seattle market value. You don't hear about that happening often, and it really made me feel appreciated while pushing back against the feeling that in order to really make more money, you have to job hop. Health insurance is pretty good, great 401K matching (4% after you've been there a year), and charitable donation matching. As an engineer, I spend 90% of my time coding. Limited meetings.

Cons

The churn is real in leadership positions. Managers get shuffled around constantly, you can expect to have multiple managers in a year, and therefore no continuity in how you're managed or how you're evaluated for promotions. I've not had any truly awful managers, but the (multiple) managers I've had have always been either good at helping with technical stuff, or good with dealing with the mentorship/skill-growing "people" side of management. Never both skills in the same person. Also due to the churn, the org, or parts of it, can seem rudderless at times. The org won't pay for its devs to go to conferences. No "learning" budget like you see at some companies (where you get a bit of money for tech books, online courses, etc). Building 864 isn't terrible, but it's not great. Same story for PTO days. Flexible scheduling and the ability to work from home periodically should be more consistently supported. Plenty of teams are fine with it, but others aren't. The proxy.

avatar
Nordstrom Response
8y
Hello, Thank you for making us aware of these problems, and I’m very sorry to learn that your experience with our team structures has so far been unsatisfactory. We strive to hire managers who give every employee the tools and information that he or she needs to do their job, and if we fell short, we’d like to hear where and how. As we grow, we are simultaneously working to make expectations and responsibilities clearer for each role on the team on a continuing basis, and we are collecting feedback along the way to help us improve. If you would be open to sharing more details about your experience, we would like to review them to inform our efforts. Please contact us at any time at NordTechFeedback@nordstrom.com. Sincerely, Patrick Welch VP Technology Nordstrom
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