-A toxic workplace culture. There is bullying in the office, favouritism, there are threats and intimidation tactics. I have seen numerous people be sexually harassed.
-The behaviour of the senior management is awful, easily the worst I have ever seen in a workplace and it happens right in front of the CEO, who lets it happen.
-You will get brought into the company on false premises 'high salary' 'you could be an advisor in 2 years' '£50,000 in your first year in commission
if you work hard' none of this is true. They will tell you what you want to hear so you choose to work for them. There is no career progress there: the longest-serving member of staff in the office I was in had been there 5 years before they let her start sitting her CIIs (I was told you need to build the 'soft skills' up first before you can sit your exams because otherwise, you won't be a good advisor). In the UK at any financial advisory, after your probation period, they will let you sit them. At deVere you essentially work for a call centre where they need you to get good on the phone because if you ever did get to become an advisor you have to sell deVere's financial products to British ex-pats over the phone. There are no roads that lead into deVere, everything is sold to people over the phone. No clients ever apply and request their services because they are awful.
What I learned as I started talking to more people is that all the financial products they sell will lock you into really long contracts where the client does not make any money, but deVere does. As a result, deVere trains all their employees to get excellent over the phone so that they can sell these awful products.
-The company is essentially a call centre, no matter the role you are brought in to do, (they commonly advertise you will be a business development associate or a wealth management associate which right as you are about to join they change to something else) you will end up picking up the phone for several hours every day and trying to sell to people why they should work for deVere. I joined the role on several false premises given to me by the recruitment consultant who sold it to me, and then I am the one over the phone selling the same false premises to the next person.
-They have been raided numerous times by the financial authorities and escaped conviction. In the office, I joined we all started together as a whole new team. What I later learned after moving back to the UK is that they had to let everybody go who had previously been in that office so that the financial authorities had no one to question when they raided the office. All the paperwork and computers were taken to find information that could be used against them.
I couldn't suggest more strongly, do not work here. Unfortunately for the other graduates and new staff that work there, for a lot of them, it is their first role in finance and so they are naive to all the lies you are told by management and don't know any better than the daily bullying and harassment.
There will be plenty of other opportunities available for a first role in finance, so I strongly implore you not to work for this company.
