Shell Oil US – “Great place to start but not a great place to stay.”

Pros

Shell offers great opportunites for recent graduates. They can get the necessary experience on the career ladder to pursue a more satisfying opportunity at another major corporation that will respect the individual worker.

Cons

Shell often hires you for one job, but ends up giving you another job. Often it is outside what you have been trained for or have experience in. Every year you are "evaluated" against your peers and the lowest evaluated employees are "put on notice" that they must improve or will be let go. The problem with this "evaluation" is that you are compared with all employees worldwide who have been evaluated by their immediate Manager. All "evaluations" are sent to HR and then people who do not even know you or your work performance are determining your future with Shell. Shell uses this method of Forced Ranking to get rid of employees and hire less experienced employees to keep costs down.
Also there is little or no communication between upper management and the employees. HR does not handle complaints for the employee but only for upper management. The HR representatives I have witnessed who took complaints from my fellow coworkers did nothing to help the worker but suddenly our immediate supervisor knew everything about the complaint. It does no good to go the HR with any employee complaints because the employee will suddenly have poor "evaluations".

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to your employees and eliminate the use of Forced Ranking for Employee Performance.