Pros
Good pay and reasonable workload
Kontras
I worked on the benefits team in the Chicago office for about four months and joined with two years of prior benefits experience. I was initially excited to work with a team of benefits analysts because I had come from a place where I was the only one doing benefits. During my first few months at Sims, I shadowed team members through their daily tasks, but there was no formal onboarding or structured training plan. I wasn't too worried about not having a formal training plan as I had worked for companies like this before, so I was making an active effort to stay engaged, ask questions, and take detailed notes, and I initially felt I was getting the hang of the company’s processes. However, it later became clear that parts of the training I received did not align with my direct manager's expectations.
And that’s where the problem lies: MANAGEMENT. They are stuck in the archaic practice of leading teams through fear rather than support. Team members seemed afraid to speak up, ask questions, or be honest out of concern for their reputation or job security. Regular 1:1 meetings were also not part of the team structure, and when I proactively requested brief check-ins to better align on goals and expectations, pieces of conversations were later used as evidence suggesting that I was underperforming rather than using areas of improvement THAT I HAD RAISED as opportunities for coaching, clarification, or support.
The team environment was also difficult. The benefits team met every morning for 30 minutes, but these meetings would often last anywhere from 60-90 minutes. While some discussions were productive, many were extended because management was complaining about frustrations they had with certain situations or bad mouthing members of other internal Sims teams. This felt unhealthy, toxic, and like bad leadership. The public group chat also felt less like a place for support and more like a test of whether you understood something correctly. In one instance, after I asked a question in the group chat, the person who trained me privately gave me helpful guidance and then asked me not to tell the manager that they had helped. That stood out because I had never worked on a team where helping a newer employee felt like something that needed to be hidden.
Overall, the role looked promising on paper and started out feeling like a good opportunity, but the experience quickly bled a trail of red flag after red flag. There was no structured onboarding, no clear or consistent expectations, limited manager support, and very little sense of true collaboration despite frequent statements that “the team is always here to support you.” Be wary… management presents the team well at first, but in my experience, mistakes or too many questions could quickly put you on management's bad side, and there was little opportunity to recover once that happened.