E*TRADE Financial Reviews

Current Employee – been working at E*TRADE Financial full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – -nice team members to work with
-good compensation

Cons – -no flexible work hours
-no work from home
-cube walls are short
-director and VP are inconsiderate
-no good projects are coming
-I am not being used to my full potential

Advice to Senior Management – Motivate your employees to want to be here by giving interesting projects and flexible work hours.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at E*TRADE Financial full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Goood balance of work and personal life.

Cons – Very bad compensation. 20% below market average.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at E*TRADE Financial for more than a year

Pros – Salary is competitive, good benefits package

Cons – With the new CEO, the company is in a huge state of flux. Multiple top level executives were given their walking papers and serious reorg is in the works. They are still digging themselves out of a huge sinkhole due to the loan crisis and are expected to cut 100 million dollars in expenses this year.

Advice to Senior Management – GET IT TOGETHER or SELL

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at E*TRADE Financial full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Great place to get some experience and then move on. People are generally nice to work with.

Cons – Systems systems systems. For a company that prides itself on technology ETrade has more system issues than any company I've ever seen. Embarassing plain and simple.

Some managers are severly unqualified and lack graduate degrees. Promotions are based on friendship and not merit in many departments. Professionalism is not exactly the strong suit.

Advice to Senior Management – Get a clue

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at E*TRADE Financial full-time for more than a year

Pros – They hand out titles like lollipops and E*TRADE looks good on a resume.

Cons – They hook you in the position with a higher than normal salary and promises of bonsuses, raises and promotions. Opinion throughout the company is that these are never delivered on. Good jobs go to outside hires. Very poorly managed from senior managers on up. Extreme micro management. Policies within the company don't communicate to each other.

Advice to Senior Management – Back off. Let your employees do what they were hired for without constant check ins.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at E*TRADE Financial full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Good staff and middle managers. Salary and benefits could be better, but not bad overall. Interesting industry. Good place to start a career.

Cons – Way too much micro-managing. Very secretive and very political atmosphere. Morale rather low. Senior management has an every person for themselves attitude. Very difficult to move around to other areas of the company.

Advice to Senior Management – Provide more opportunities to move to other areas of the company.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at E*TRADE Financial full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Good tech team to work with

Cons – Poor management team, not much career growth

Current Employee – been working at E*TRADE Financial full-time

Pros – The product spectrum is expanding, and as consultants, we have quite a bit of flexibilty and control over what we present to clients and how. Some of the folks on the sales distribution team are great and really focus their resources on helping FC's succeed.

Cons – - The comp plan changes frequently. The newest change makes it difficult to gauge how your bonus is progressing throughout the quarter if you have clients who are active traders (despite the fact that all that trading actually makes E*TRADE money).
- While it's nice that you're given a book of business to start with, it's extremely difficult to remove clients from your book who don't belong there. You may end up with people who have no contact info, who have no desire to speak with you, or who don't live locally (if you're in a branch),.
- Some branch managers seem great to work with, others can be micro-managers or number crunchers who aren't very helpful in their role to foster sales growth. Some branches work well together, others may have FC's who rarely interact with one another.
- If you don't have an operations person in your branch, then be prepared to waste some time here and there on service issues or paperwork.
- Some of the leads we get are complete garbage, yet you're still hounded by management if you don't properly attempt them several times and prove that you've exhausted all avenues to uncover business. I'd rather focus on actual opportunities than satisfy some arbitrary requirement.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at E*TRADE Financial full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Flexible place to work at...

Cons – they take advantage of people and make them work hard but don't pay them the money worth their job

Advice to Senior Management – No comments

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at E*TRADE Financial full-time for more than a year

Pros – For the work required the pay is pretty good. I have generally had a good experience with the people I work with...they generally do not hire the kind of person one normally associates with a brokerage firm (slicked hair, angry etc). Good base pay. I have made many, many friends who I will always be in contact with. Local Management has always been good to me.

They are very good about not requiring late hours, weekend work etc.

Cons – The comp plan for sales associates is the worst thing that has ever been excreted out of a human mind. Its very core is designed to cost you money at every turn. Client dies? Likely you will lose money. Client buys a house? You lose money. Client sells Mutual Funds? You lose money. And don't confuse this with a loss of retention or some hypothetical loss of continuing payments. You literally are charged from your bonus dollar for dollar. In other words, everything you sell will one day come back to cost you just as much, if not more (if it's value went up), than you were paid to sell it in the first place. Thousands of dollars a quarter will disappear due to things you have 0 control over. I won't go into too much detail, but I will say that when this plan was introduced to me I scoffed at the hypothetical losses I saw coming.

Unfortunately they are not hypothetical anymore.

Advice to Senior Management – They live in their own world. I won't bother.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company