I actually wrote a 3 star review on August 3rd 2022 for this company, and it was pretty obvious it was me, because it was written by a “mail clerk in SJ who had worked for the immigration department for two months”, which fit my description. Pretty surprised I was not fired for it. In the old one, I said that I had issues with the main office’s upper management and policies, and that my office’s management seemed like they were trying to be helpful, with limited effectiveness. I still stand by that review, with the added note that after 7 more months, it only got worse, and that my office’s management actually does share the same issues as the main office management. I'm still not sure if they are oblivious to how rude/negligent/inconsiderate they sometimes are, or if they are actually intentionally gaslighting their subordinates, but either way, it’s a red flag.
Additionally, some of them are currently not responsible people–they claimed that they were regularly reviewing workloads or activity reports to make sure that no one is overworked or that people are following proper procedure, but they were not.
1. Once, one clerk was booked for over 20 appointments in one day, with 5 of them in the same timeslot, and not only did none of the supervisors catch this until the clerk in question pointed this out, but over the course of three days, the supervisors managed to successfully reschedule only ONE of those appointments. Then on the 20 appointment day, none of the supervisors who allowed this mistake to happen chose to change their priorities to cover the brunt of the extra work created by those errors, and it was only other clerks/paralegals who helped. There have been better response rates and support since then, but not without repeated pushing from clerks.
2. Another trend that I saw a lot was that certain people would pull clerks to help with appointments without giving them any heads-up or asking if they had time. On paper, they did respect when people said “I don’t have time”, but as a lower ranking employee, it was often hard to tell higher-ups that you would rather prioritize something else.
3. There were multiple incidents where I and multiple other coworkers were repeatedly questioned by management over things like missing client documents, sometimes in front of other employees, only for those documents to conveniently and quietly turn up in those supervisors’ offices once the worst of the blame game blew over.
I’m not accusing or speculating anymore, but my point is that as a lower hierarchy worker, current management came off as very unreliable/unsupportive, appeared to show very little respect for most people’s time/effort, and were not held to the same standard of work ethic and quality that they expected from their subordinates.
A few examples of other general cons:
Low retention/high turnover: I worked here for 9 months in the immigration department, and by the time I left, I possibly had the fourth/fifth longest tenure of any active SJ immigration team member, and possibly the longest tenure of an active team member in a non-supervising position. This is out of an in-house team that hovered around 16 people. This is just with regard to the in-house team, and does not include teams from other depts/offices.
Gossip/Toxic environment: The office often felt like a police state. People would suddenly stop showing up, or you would notice that their work accounts were deactivated, and you would never hear anything about it. People would get pulled into managers’ offices for private chats about “spreading negativity in the office” when they were caught trying to figure things out or trying to let others know what happened. It’s true that the rumors were not great for morale, but the way management handled rumors only fed into the fear and negativity, when most of the time, people just wanted to know what happened to their coworkers.
Ethics: I’m not particularly scrupulous, I was just a mail clerk, and I have no background in law/contracts, but the practice definitely came off as being way more about getting money out of the clients than it is about giving the clients their money’s worth. It’s kind of typical corporate/big(-ish) business behavior, and that works if that’s what you are looking for, but it’s definitely something to keep in mind if your interest in immigration law is centered on the people, and not the profit.
Company bribes employees to write good reviews: Yeah, this one is pretty funny, given that I did actually previously write a review, and never got a gift card. If I remember correctly, they announced that they were offering gift cards in exchange for reviews on August 2nd, and you can tell because there is a massive batch of 5 star reviews all dated for August 2nd and 3rd. Definitely a con, and an embarrassingly desperate one, but at least it’s funny.
