Pros
Other than the fact that you would receive a paycheck, I cannot think of a positive reason to work at Santander.
Cons
The culture is poisonous. That's not an overstatement, it is simply a poisonous place to work. 40 hour weeks feel like 90. Employee morale is at a level too low to describe -- I've not seen anything like it in my career. Everyone I know is actively looking to leave Santander, and employees openly and brazenly discuss at work their job search efforts and status. I even know two successful mid-career people who simply resigned without a new position lined up because they could not take the environment anymore. HR is the most negative and least responsive of anywhere I've worked in my entire 30-year career. Annual reviews are useless, as HR tells every manager how many of each rating level he is permitted to have on his team. So no matter how good a job your employees have done, you are not permitted to provide them with a rating (or a raise - they're non-existent) commensurate with their performance. You are forced to rate them at the level HR tells you they should be. This HR practice, called stacked ranking, was debunked and abandoned by reputable companies a decade or more ago. At Santander? It's relatively new and an example of the progressive HR policies in which they take pride. There is little if any decision making authority in the U.S. -- anything of substance has to be decided in Spain, and the process of getting a decision made is excruciatingly slow and painful. The U.S. executives put in place to run the company are fired and replaced on a continual basis, and the bank has reached the point where it can only attract executive talent from the bottom level of who is available -- the people with the skills and talent needed to turn this bank around simply and wisely will not come work here. Additionally, the most senior positions have been used as 2 - 3 year vacations for an endless series of Spanish executives who know little or nothing about banking in the U.S. and do little or nothing of substance while they are here. In the five years that I have worked at Santander, we have had 5 CEO's, 4 Chief Credit Officers and I, a mid-level manager, have had 7 bosses.
