Pros
I worked for ADP in different capacities for quite a few years. They are a good company to start out with and get experience, especially for people who want white collar work that may not have a college degree. And if you don't have a college degree, they have a pretty good tuition reimbursement program to help you get one. For the most part, the pay and benefits are fair, The stock purchase program is decent, since ADP's stock is stable and pays a nice dividend. Since ADP is a large AAA rated company that is well-known in the business world, it can potentially be a resume booster as well. Depending on the tone of the senior management in your office, it can be a fun environment to work in; .some of the best people I have ever worked with were associates of ADP.
Cons
1. I'm going to start with this: ADP invests more time and money in selling its products than developing them. Notice that most of the positive reviews about ADP employment are from sales people; titles like major accounts district manager, or sbs sales rep, etc. That's because ADP sales reps receive the best sales training in the industry and are very well compensated. They get a nice base and a very lucrative commission structure. Some of them go on to even better sales positions, like pharmaceutical reps or working for prestigious tech companies because the business world recognizes ADP training as world class. The ones who are really good also get the opportunities to attend Presidents Club which is usually some extraordinary lavish trip to Australia or the like. So it's really great if you are a successful sales professional. However, if you are not in sales or other revenue driving position, you are not nearly as important to ADP. This may sound like sour grapes, but it's really just the truth; the sales organization is critical to ADP's success but they should not forget about the equally important service and support positions. 2. As previously stated, ADP invests more time selling products than developing them. In my experience implementing payroll/hr solutions for ADP, many of the products are poorly developed, untested before release, cumbersome to use for the client, and are inflexible solutions that do not interface well with third-party systems. On top of this, the sales reps consistently set improper, bloated expectations to clients about the capabilities and limitations of their employer services products and/or the time frame in which they can be setup. And while they move on to their next big sale, the Implementation and support teams are expected to deliver on the promises made by the sales reps. (SBS reps were notorious for submitting all kinds of poorly constructed deals at the end of the month to make a bonus, and expecting the client to be implemented in 2 days) There is absolutely no accountability to the Sales Reps when a client is unhappy with the reality of the product or the manner in which it is setup. Furthermore, if a client cancels during an implementation because of improper expectations, not only is the sales rep "charged back" their commission, but the Implementation Specialist is also penalized as a "no-start" in their reported metrics. No-starts are a portion of the metrics that can count towards one's performance review. 3. The incentive pay for implementation specialists was a joke. At one point it was a very generous attainable system whereby quarterly incentive payouts could be achieved by implementing enough revenue that exceeded the predetermined goal. However, over time ADP started scaling it back to save money. Finally it got to a point where everyone no longer had a chance to achieve incentive payouts, but rather each specialist was pitted against each other to be one of the top 2 or 3 people that would get an incentive on a semi-annual basis. (they scaled back from quarterly to semi-annually). On top of this, the specialist had to have a client survey average of something like 82% (don't remember the exact number) to achieve incentives. The percentage is derived from a little system that ADP came up with in their survey system where very satisfied was 100 all the way down to very dissatisfied which was -100. So think about that for a second, the scale doesn't range from 0 to 100, it ranges from -100 to +100. Therefore if a survey came back with just one or 2 very dissatisfied scores with negative numbers this could pull an average score down pretty far pretty fast, making incentive payout harder to attain. As a bonus, the implementation specialist was responsible for the first 2 questions on the survey, which were about the performance of the clients' SALES REP. So essentially, if the client was happy with the implementation of their product but disliked their sales rep and dinged those questions with poor scores on the survey, it was the implementation specialist who was penalized in their incentive payout. These leads us to draw two conclusions: 1) ADP doesn't care about the measuring performance from survey results because if they did the implementation specialist would not be accountable for responses to sales questions. 2) there is no accountability from the sales organization, other than driving revenue. 4. ADP's service delivery model is awful. They love to turn anything support related into a call center model. This works fine for companies supporting widgets, but since support reps need to have extensive payroll and compliance knowledge, many client issues are complex and cannot be resolved in the first call. To compound this, reps are instructed to keep calls under 6 minutes or some other ridiculous time frame and then give the client a case number and tell them they will get a call back from level 2 support in whatever SLA that is. It's quite frustrating for the client because so many issues go unresolved or just drag on. If you don't believe me, find a human resources user forum and do a search on ADP and see the complaints. 5. ADP loves to run lean. Too lean. They do not hire enough people to do all the work and they give lousy raises, even for employees who achieve "exceeds" level on their annual performance. Their other favorite tactic is to severely limit pay increases for legacy employees. So if someone earns a promotion that is 6 pay grades higher than current, it's unlikely that they will get paid within the minimum of that pay grade. It's better to quit and come back just to get paid market value for a position. 6. Miscellaneous items : - Everything at ADP is mainframe based from the 1970s. Yes it's a bulletproof payroll system but it's completely archaic and frustrating to use, plus has an awful help system. - There is no transparency between departments and products; Silos is the best description. - During their busy season which they call "year end" they expect you to implement payroll and HR for over 30 accounts at a time, which is too high of an account load to do a quality job. Usually have some payrolls that blow up because the reps are too overloaded. Somebody always cries or "freaks out". Backup infrastructure for a rep that is out sick is nonexistent. - I don't like to generalize, but mid and upper level managers seem to be in denial that process improvement and product changes need to be made.
