Blue Shield Of California Employee Review

Current Employee – been working at Blue Shield Of California full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – -Very inexpensive HMO health care plan
-Telecommuting option for some jobs
-Competitive salary (but slightly low), good bonus structure
-Company embraces social media and encourages employees to coalesce

Cons – -Letter culture. Too much emphasis on degrees and academic accomplishments and not enough on expertise and experience. Everyone puts letters after their names (John Doe, MBA). Greatly divisive elitist culture, Stifles relationship building.
-Shortage of inspiring leaders; surplus of managers and whip-crackers.
-HR essentially non-existent. Virtual only and run by skeleton crew of admins
-Hiring/recruiting process one of the worst in America. They should give "I survived the BSC hiring process" to those who get hired. Seriously.
-Internal training opportunities in areas of leadership, communication, etc non -existent
-Self serving culture where insecure managers do not recognize, share, or shine light on great ideas
-Many departments crippled by legacy software and systems. Some still using DOS apps

Advice to Senior Management – Get real. Get down in the trenches and instead of doing data deep dives, try doing some culture deep dives to see how dept. managers are treating their people. There is a huge disconnect between what companys says are its values and how many leaders actually act.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company