Centene Culture FAQ

Pros

The pros are very few and far between here. The pay was decent providing you could stay at 40 hours (more on that in the Cons section). The cafeteria was great in downtown Clayton and there's a lot of name recognition when you have the company on your resume at least here in St. Louis.

Cons

Yeah, there's lots here. It's a really toxic culture where burnout is very common and most of the time, you are forced to go over 40 hours most weeks which means you are working for free in those cases. Work/Life balance is non-existent here as I saw many people working 50 and even 60 hours a week and at least in our department, it was so hard to get people hired. What I later found out was that HR is very slow posting jobs so departments poach employees from other departments which is unsustainable because eventually some department is going to the the odd one out and will have to post the position. The Clayton office in particular is very stuffy and very conservative in dress (meaning you have to wear a tie). Also politics runs rampant in the Clayton office so if you don't like that, stop applying and look elsewhere. There were a lot of people I met that I wish I didn't meet because all they cared about was looking good and moving up and would use other people to make them look bad so that they could in turn look good. Business is growing really fast here and I would say probably too fast because the systems and other processes as well as workers have not been able to sustainably adapt to the growth. An example of this is the databases. This is the only company where I've been sent in a queue where I've waited over an hour just to run a query. Meanwhile, I'm just waiting and I'm not being a very productive employee since I need that query to finish so that I can do my job. A big let down for me was when I gave my two weeks notice. They did not explain the process at all and because of that, I lost my flexible spending account to where I can't access the money. Also, they do not pay out on vacation upon leaving the company so I lost that too which is not good policy. Every other company I've been at, I at least got some sort of vacation pay. They also never gave me my exit interview or anything so I guess this is where they're going to get my feedback (albeit in public ). As a side note too, they seem to have this bizarre cult like following of the CEO as his picture is on the home page every time you open it up and he's on every single training video where he adds absolutely no value to the video whatsoever. One time they were pressuring employees to vote for him for some kind of executive of the year award. To sum this up, there are just so many cons for me that there is no way I would recommend this company to even my enemies, never mind my friends. I would tell anyone reading this to stay far away from this place.

Advice to Management

I would say split up the companies. It's not manageable with the brain trust currently there and even if you replace them, I think the toxic culture makes it almost impossible to manage.

Pros

High pay for entry level job

Cons

Interview process was quite long

Pros

Still has a ways to go, but always striving for best in industry technology.

Cons

No onboarding process, takes weeks to get equipment.