Great Benefits at a Cost
Pros
The pay is competitive. Enterprise will teach you how to be a great interviewee; how to manage effectively and how to handle high stress situations. You start off with 2 weeks paid vacation and gain a week gradually in your first year of employment until you hit 5 years where your PTO is upped to 3 weeks and around 1 week of "choice time" (meaning either sick or personal time). If you do well in sales, you get the chance to be a part of either a "Winner's circle" or "Elite Club", where you spend a paid day with the Regional Vice President of your regions Area Managers and other top sales people, doing something fun like bowling, going to a race track, axe throwing etc. They encourage outtings with your branch after work that are on the company dime so that you can spend time with your coworkers at Happy Hour or just doing something fun. They tell you if you do well you can get promoted up to an Area Manager in 6 years with the possibility of making six figures in that time. If you are able to promote even higher than that, you even have the potential to be a millionaire on the salary that General Managers make, even though that takes many years and quite a bit of luck. They hire based on personality, therefore I have met some of my life-long friends at Enterprise and have enjoyed working with almost everyone that I have worked with. Enterprise gives you a paid volunteer day so you can take a day off and volunteer at either an event that Enterprise curated or something you have found yourself. You learn a lot about cars. You can promote to other locations, which means you could have the opportunity to live somewhere that you may not have been able to otherwise. They care a lot about Diversity and Inclusion and are aware that at one time that Enterprise was a bit of a boys club, every year they have a Women Internal Networking event where you get the chance to meet with women in higher roles than you talk about the specific challenges we face as women in a field of work that is dominated by men. This is a great learning experience and taught me how to network. They also have something similar for minorities called Minorities Internal Networking, which is the same concept but with the focus on the challenges that minorities face. Enterprise expects their employees to work hard; because of this job recruiters love to see Enterprise on someone's resume. That tells them that this person is a hard worker and can work through high stress situations. If you are able to promote into an admin position you do have the option sometimes to be able to work from home at least one day a week.
Cons
There is a lot of pressure from corporate to have impeccable customer service scores which is measured through customer service surveys randomly distributed to customers at the end of the rental period. If you don't have a good customer service score not only will you not be able to promote but if you're a branch manager, you can lose your job. There have been instances where a customer gave my branch a 1 out 5 and wrote a review about how great the experience was. She called us and said she accidentally hit the 1 instead of 5, and corporate told us that we cannot change it and it caused our customer service score to plummet which resulted in a stall in promotions. They say at Enterprise you can promote quickly, but that's because people above you (Area Managers, Branch Managers and Assistant Managers) are constantly leaving Enterprise. The work life balance is the absolute worst part about the job, you are expected to be at the branch before opening until after closing, there were and still are many days that I'm away from my home for 12 hours a day because of this. (6AM - 6PM). I get home, sleep, wake up and go back to work. This is not ideal if you are a parent (which I'm not), or are any kind of caregiver at all. It can even be difficult on marriages if your spouse has a regular job schedule. Speaking of parents, if you have a baby while employed with Enterprise you are not guaranteed your position when you come back from leave and men are always pressured to only take 2 weeks because while you are on leave your pay still depends on how well your branch does if you're a Branch Manager. They pressure you to move to a new location to promote and if you choose to stay where you are and not move they hold it against you if they felt like your reasoning for not throwing for a position wasn't good enough for them. The pressure to do well in sales and customer service is so large that I have seen desperate employees put renters in vehicles that needed tires, oil changes and renewed plates/registrations, because they didn't want the customer to give a bad score for having to wait for the vehicle to be ready. (Obviously, I have always stepped in in those instances). There is a lot of pressure with having at least 92% of your fleet on the road at all times, that includes vehicles that are in the shop or are waiting on new license plates. When potential customers call the reservations team the reservations team will look at the fleet of a branch and decide that even if a vehicle is in shop status that they will still send the customer to the branch for a reservation for that vehicle. Customers are able to book in day-of for vehicles that are not physically at the branch and then you have to scramble and call every shop and branch near you and pray to the rental gods that you are able to pick one of those vehicles up for the customer so that they don't give you a bad customer service score or get mad at you for something that's out of your hands. Your customer can call customer service at any time during the rental and customer service will almost never take the right amount of payment to extend the rental, and/or they constantly give your customer the wrong information ie. "you can rent that Land Rover with a debit card" (you can't.) Branch Managers are held accountable for everything, even things that your employees do. If your employee does something bad enough, you can lose your job. There is insurmountable pressure on Branch Managers. If you have mental health issues at all, this is not the job for you. You will work harder than you have ever worked at any job.