H&R Block – “Good job if you're looking for something temporary.”

Pros

Job experience for those starting out a career, or part-time work during tax season.

Cons

Lack of training given to new hires. H&R Block teaches only the basics in tax theory, and you pretty much have to learn more difficult tax subjects on your own. Can be hard on new hires, when a customer comes in with a difficult return that they don't know how to do, leading to a dissatisfied customer, or worse (inaccurate completed return). To be fair, there are usually some tax pros with lots of years of experience in each office, but through lack of employee retention (since it's only a seasonal job) most tax pros have limited experience.

Hours are pretty terrible, there's two short peak seasons (early February and April) where you can get full-time hours, but between those dates a first year hire can only expect 10 hours a week at the most.

Also, the concept of doing personal returns at a retail shop like H&R Block has been dying a slow death for years now with the releases of powerful and intuitive personal tax software and e-filing. So every year, the company suffers more and more customer loss, leading to a lot of stress on management and office leaders since they can't meet their number goals. H&R Block can only grow through attrition, meaning the death of mom & pop tax shops and hopefully their main competitors like Liberty and Jackson Hewitt.

Advice to Senior Management

They're trying to move in the right direction by focusing more on tax expertise you'll get at H&R Block through their advertisements, but they have a long way to go actually implementing it through comprehensive and continuing tax training of their tax pros.