Pros
- Tries hard to provide fringe benefits to aid employees job satisfaction. Small gifts to employees like candy, the occasional beer at lunch, and amusement park admissions. - Entry level salary is higher than average for some positions, especially the technical jobs. - One of the only "real" high-tech options in the Cleveland area. If you love Ohio and refuse to move to a tech hotspot, this is the only real option. - Management is approachable. I never had an issue talking to any manager. They were all willing to listen, up to the CEO. - Other benefits in employment package are slightly above average. Health insurance is comparable to other companies. Onsite "Wellness" office as well. - Good work-life balance.
Cons
- Though the company is several decades old, a majority of growth has occurred in the past four years. As a result, the company operates with immature corporate policies and direction. Due to their recent success in the industry, they are unwilling to consider these flaws. - Suffers from many mid and senior level managers that are in their positions because they started with the company years ago when it was much smaller. This occasionally leads to poor decisions, especially internally. I’m sure they were vetted and had to qualify for their jobs, but it’s clear many of them should not be where they are and got there mostly through company loyalty. - Is growing too fast for its own corporate structure. Hyland culture values risk taking and innovation, and it operates as if any kind of corporate structure is a bad thing. The training process needs much more definition inside specific departments, and yet no one bothers to try. Departments rarely communicate with each other and simply assume they are all on the same page. - The development process for its products is very disconnected from tech support and installation engineers (Technical Consultants). I was repeatedly told by long-time employees that they had no ability to keep up with capabilities or changes to the products, and yet when I voiced these concerns to management (including Bill Priemer himself in a Q&A), it was brushed off as "just the way we do business." - Despite having a lengthier training process than some other competitors, Hyland provides no formal training beyond a new hire class, which is an entry-level introduction to configuring OnBase. For highly technical positions such as Tech Support, QC, and Technical Consultants, the post entry training process is literally "go figure it out on your own." When I voiced this concern to mid-level management, they took offense and claimed it was not the case. But if the training process provides no instruction and only directs the new hire to look up the information on their own (from dozens of unspecified sources), then by definition it is go figure it out on your own. If you have a background heavy in SQL or Oracle databases, or OnBase itself, this shouldn't be a problem for you. But if you do not, be prepared to spend a lot of your wasted payroll hours frustrated. It was not uncommon to spend 40 hours on a topic that could have been instructed and completed in two. - Because Hyland values going their own way in the ECM industry, they have created a number of positions that are misleading outside of their own company. For example, the people who install the software on new customer systems are called Technical Consultants. When you use the word “Consultant” in a software job title, it carries a certain industry expectation. That expectation is not what Hyland uses the title for. TC’s are front end tech support specialists who spend a vast majority of their time troubleshooting OnBase and trying to get it to work on the customer’s system. The only “consulting” they do is perhaps helping the customer fix an issue. I find this very misleading and borderline dishonest. The previous job title was “Solution Engineer” and I think that was a far more honest description of their job. - The technical positions at Hyland are a dead-end in the IT world due to lack of industry-wide certification. Quality Control, Tech Support, and Tech Consultants must have in-depth knowledge of things like Microsoft SQL, but Hyland does not provide the actual industry certifications for that knowledge. You can go get it on your own, but so can anyone outside of Hyland. You might be able to use your time at Hyland to get a different IT job, but you will not be much better off than anyone else with the same amount of time, and if they have the certification, you’ll be behind the curve. As a result, Hyland is a company you must either stay with until retirement or accomplish other education on your own. - Overall, Hyland does a good job of providing benefits, but if you set that aside and look at the day-to-day operations and the future of the company, it does not reveal as much a rosy picture as they try to present to the world. I believe it is a case of the “frog in boiling water” syndrome. Almost all the decision makers have been there so long that they haven’t noticed the small changes that have lead up to some very disconnected and off-track processes, and because of their company loyalty they are not willing to create the necessary solutions. While Hyland continues to make in-roads as the underdog software company, they are also becoming a more attractive target to large company acquisition, such as IBM or Microsoft. There is a growing impression in the company that the current status quo won’t last, and within the next five to ten years they will find themselves the target of a purchase or takeover by larger software company. I had a chance to ask Bill Premiere this very question and he assured me the company was currently in the hands of a “private investment firm,” but he also accepted the possibility of a buyout within that time frame.
