Pros
HR in the job title so you can easily find a HR role elsewhere. All staff are in the same boat and you will make fast friends.
Cons
If you are considering a role as a HR Documentation please, please read some of these reviews in FULL. Staff are incentivised to post positive reviews and there is a culture of fear to put anyone off leaving honest reviews. On the surface, this role sounds like the ideal introduction to HR for those with little to no experience. However, the role as described in job adverts/interview/training is entirely different. This is not a HR role, you will be working in a high volume, heavily targeted call centre. There is no incentive - nor reward - for providing good service or solid HR advice to clients. The purpose of the role is so simply provide clients with one size fits all HR documents. The nature of the productivity targets means you will be penalised if you spend more that a whopping 12.5 minutes per task, a target that is simply unrealistic if you wish to truly understand what a client actually needs. If you’re happy to blindly copy and paste phrases into the same three documents day in, day out in effectively a sales-based role, then you will excel here. If you actually have any interest or regard for proper HR, look elsewhere. Peninsula appear to pride themselves on the training they provide, but if you’re looking to join the documentation team prepare to teach yourself the role while being punished for ‘not knowing’ things you’ve never been taught. Management are spread thin between a team of inexperienced employees as the staff turnover is incredibly high. This means there is little support for new staff and even less once you’ve been there over 3 months and are left to your own devices. While I understand and appreciate that EVERYONE at Peninsula is overworked, I found that there was a complete lack of respect in the way senior staff spoke to employees who were asking questions they needed answers to in order to provide a service to a client. While this would still be unacceptable if proper training were provided, it seems absolutely outrageous to be spoken to like an idiot for asking questions you’ve never EVER had the answer to. The targeted nature of the role means your every single movement is monitored. Upper management sent emails to all staff in error listing EVERY employees length of toilet break in a day, with an instruction to speak to those employees who were deemed to go over the ‘acceptable’ length of time away from the phone. They target everything. your productivity, whether you make sales, whether your calls are quality, whether you’ve signed people up to the app, whether you’ve had enough customer compliments, if you’ve had mentions on feefo. If you’re not prepared to sell yourself to meet these targets, go elsewhere. Work an internal HR role where you will gain exposure to a range of HR processes and learn to understand them, instead of learning Peninsula’s fixed answers to problems. The business as a whole has a huge problem with blame-culture, with different departments falling over each other to send work elsewhere to try and keep on top of theirs with workload. This means that clients are passed from pillar to post on a regular basis, so prepare to deal with an endless number of unhappy clients who are out for blood. And forget support from management if a client is complaining, you either fix it yourself or you become the problem. If you are considering a role in documentation I would urge you to look elsewhere. This is not what HR is about and the role will affect your confidence, mental health and enthusiasm for HR. Peninsula love to mention that they provide a full Employee Assistance Programme to staff who are struggling, but this is a bandaid to a bullet wound when the company culture itself is the root cause of most employees issues. Providing counselling to fix work-related stress is counter intuitive, and the problem ends up circular. Wait it out, find a better role. Don’t rush into a position with Peninsula, consider your options. Nobody there wishes to stay, few employees make it over a years service.
