Do NOT work here - Cycle Technician Halfords Employee Review

There are so many things wrong with the job roles, people, systems, progression and expectations in this company that when I speak about it I do not even know where to begin. - Pay, every member of the retail staff is underpaid. Due to chronic understaffing, you will inevitably be forced to do work you are unqualified for or that does not fall within the responsibilities of your role, you will become proficient in it out of necessity and your extra effort and importance to the store will be unthanked and unrewarded, if you cannot do this while under pressure to learn quickly and being punished for mistakes, you will be fired and replaced, or bullied relentlessly into quitting. - This applies to anyone coming into the business new, regardless of role or previous experience. -People. Halfords unspoken tactic for employee retention is to endlessly promise the over-performers or favorites further opportunity, higher pay, a better position. Management at all levels will go behind their staffs backs promising different people the same thing and all of it is empty. At the end of the day this company prefers to hire talent externally because they are scared of creating rifts within their teams. And even then the external hires will often fall flat. - Stress. Either you will work in a store where the topdown pressure to meet targets is palpable and employees have to employ ethically questionable tactics to meet them OR you will get dormant manager awaiting the end of their career and have the endless stress of playing catch-up in a disorganised mess of a store that cannot meet its promises to its customers, the anger will often be directed at you despite your efforts to help. -Systems, the systems of this company are never reviewed, they are archaic and essentially just rely on the employee to deal with the fallouts of their failings daily. Customers can book in windscreen chip repairs in the pitch black 30 minutes before a store close (and yes, the clientele of Halfords IS stupid enough to do this), this is fixable, but problems of this nature are so frequent that some will slip through cracks and unnecessary work created by system failures will be endless, you can look at customer reviews now and see endless examples of just this. Another demonstration of the lack of any care in the Company priorities, in-store tech will only be replaced if it is literally on fire. Employees regularly have to purchase their own tools, equipment, safety gear because the company is too cheap to adequately provide when requested. They will question everything. -Customers, You will genuinely lose faith in humanity dealing with the kind of cretinous, entitled, unmannerly ---- that you will be forced to interact with. I am well seasoned in customer service, and have had personal experiences that have made me into an extremely patient person, but Halfords interactions have genuinely left me a colder more cynical person. Yes, there is good, but we live in England where basic manners and treating people as human beings is minimum standard - Halfords once had a reputation of over-delivering a high level of service, essentially customers became used to the stores being a place where they could be babysat into decisions without using their own brains at all. Since the company has been acquired by a private equity firm, you and your colleagues are now short staffed, underpaid, underqualified and overstressed individuals that do not have the time or patience for the old customer base that previously existed, But those customers won't understand this and they will be disgruntled. A sad state of affairs. Even if you are incredibly specialised in one area, you simply cannot provide the advisory knowledge of a full fledged qualified team. Nor should you at the payrate provided. -Training, minimal. The training that you get will be in the form of un-digestable infodumps or a colleague showing you something quickly for 10 seconds and then expecting you to be able to perfectly replicate it in a weeks time. This may vary depending on who you work with, if your experience is better than this, you got lucky. Summary. I have seen men in senior positions quietly cry to themselves, I have seen drug use to cope with pressure or to "boost performance", I have seen a minimum wage positions be hired and fired 5 times consecutively and now are on the 6th candidate, physical fights and mental breakdowns of external hire deputy managers. This company and its execs need the door slammed so hard on them that the whole building comes crumbling down from above. If the minority of bright, talented and incredibly gritty people that glue this mess together were to all gain a sudden ounce of self-respect and leave, Halfords would be finished overnight.