Hell hole - Researcher/Writer Chambers and Partners Employee Review

• Incompetent and inefficient senior management. After a recent fire in the Holborn area, researchers were left without internet or phone access for about two weeks. Just when we learned that we were to be moved to temporary offices in Southwark, and after walking there and back several times after discovering that the server there didn't work either, we learned that things were back up and running in the Holborn office. A monkey could have done a better job of handling that whole situation. • Poor working conditions. The toilets are frequently blocked, desks are never cleaned, mouse droppings are all-pervasive, and I have actually seen the mice themselves running across the floor and around the desks during the working day. On one occasion I opened a drawer to find one lurking inside. During my time there I had to endure a whole day, in the middle of winter, without any form of heating. We were all sat at our desks in our hats, coats and scarves like a scene from a refugee camp. On another occasion there was no water for an entire morning and, consequently, no functioning toilets. We had to go to Wetherspoons across the road. • Ineffectual HR and financial departments. They take months to reply to emails, if they even bother to reply at all, with the result that when you have an important query about your pay or your holiday, it is left unanswered until you are beyond caring and resign yourself to losing some of your salary or annual leave. I know of at least two people who were underpaid because their payslips indicated that they had taken sick leave, when they hadn't. One is left wondering how this kind of mistake could have happened, and how often the company has got away with it in the past. Not only do you have to get by on a low salary (which, by the way, has been reduced over the years and, if the rumours are correct, is set to be decreased even further) but they try and take away what you are owed as well. • Horrendous interview process. Both interviews were full of irrelevant and often intrusive personal questions. I have known people to be asked whether they have a boyfriend, why they're still single, why their sibling/parent is 'just a <insert perceived low-status job>. I have even read of recent interviews where candidates were asked to answer a yes/no questionnaire with questions as outrageous as 'do you ever have sex dreams?'. I was applying for a position that required the ability to speak a foreign language, yet not once was my proficiency in that language tested or my relevant experience questioned. Instead, I was made to ponder over two of the logic questions that I had got wrong in the first interview until I got them right there and then on the spot. Having just graduated from one of the country’s top universities in modern languages, I felt humiliated, patronised and under-estimated. • Full of over-qualified, under-appreciated researchers. It upsets me when reading the biographies of everyone who works there to see just how talented and intelligent the employees there are, and yet how vastly under-valued they are. Chambers seem to pride themselves on their high turn-over, claiming that people tend to only stay a year or so before going on to get a training contract with a law firm. Wrong. People leave because it is an awful, awful place to work. I and a friend on the same team left without having any other job lined up. We would rather be unemployed than work there any longer. And everyone else I know is desperately looking for other work, scouring job websites every night to try and find some way out. That is not indicative of a good employer. • Many researchers work overtime for no extra pay, and get no thanks. While occasionally this hard work is rewarded with a justified promotion, far too often the wrong people are promoted for no apparent reason, with no apparent experience, and in some cases who are months behind on their own work. The result is a completely unstable and arbitrary hierarchical system. • Rigid pay structures with little room for manoeuvre. Many members of the team I was working on left within a very short space of time, yet the company refused to hire any new people or raise the pay of those who were left to pick up the pieces and do all the extra work that had been left unfinished. This just shows a complete lack of respect for their employees. And they wonder why so many people leave!