Santander reviews

The culture is poisonous. That's not an overstatement, it is simply a poisonous place to work. 40 hour weeks feel like 90. Employee morale is at a level too low to describe -- I've not seen anything like it in my career. Everyone I know is actively looking to leave Santander, and employees openly and brazenly discuss at work their job search efforts and status. I even know two successful mid-career people who simply resigned without a new position lined up because they could not take the environment anymore. HR is the most negative and least responsive of anywhere I've worked in my entire 30-year career. Annual reviews are useless, as HR tells every manager how many of each rating level he is permitted to have on his team. So no matter how good a job your employees have done, you are not permitted to provide them with a rating (or a raise - they're non-existent) commensurate with their performance. You are forced to rate them at the level HR tells you they should be. This HR practice, called stacked ranking, was debunked and abandoned by reputable companies a decade or more ago. At Santander? It's relatively new and an example of the progressive HR policies in which they take pride. There is little if any decision making authority in the U.S. -- anything of substance has to be decided in Spain, and the process of getting a decision made is excruciatingly slow and painful. The U.S. executives put in place to run the company are fired and replaced on a continual basis, and the bank has reached the point where it can only attract executive talent from the bottom level of who is available -- the people with the skills and talent needed to turn this bank around simply and wisely will not come work here. Additionally, the most senior positions have been used as 2 - 3 year vacations for an endless series of Spanish executives who know little or nothing about banking in the U.S. and do little or nothing of substance while they are here. In the five years that I have worked at Santander, we have had 5 CEO's, 4 Chief Credit Officers and I, a mid-level manager, have had 7 bosses.

Wasting 6 years of your life in a bank like this. HR is truly abysmal, they recently reshuffled key personnel but what they brought in is worst. After 6 years at the Boston HQ, the true inability of high level management to create an environment where one can make a difference and where talent is appreciated. The blend of Spanish and American style leadership has not worked; attrition rate is out of control; fragmentation in the teams and corporate spirit is low; salaries are about 25% below the competition; and above all everyone is trying to save their own ases and there is not sense of team. And wrap this up in a setting where databases and access to reliable data sources are archaic or none existent; hundreds of 20 year old consultants are running the bank and drafting key regulatory documents.. And one wonders, what is the use of having all these super well paid chief risk officers, SVPs, EVPs... currently sitting in their offices and reading through recycled power points. Final advice: this is a sinking ship, stay away. Bank will be forced to close down in one year.