CVS, my personal anecdote, the people can make it an enjoyable experience
Honestly, I will start off by saying, I actually really enjoy my job. I enjoy what I do, who I do it with, and the person's I have the privilege to interact with when I work whether it be fellow co-workers or customers. I actually love my job. Sounds hokey. I really get a kick out of what I do, but I didn't say I loved CVS as a company.
All I will say about CVS is that they are a Fortune 500 company. CVS was ranked 12th last year on that list. It sounds nice for sure working for a company ranked so highly acclaimed. But I will allow you to create your own preconceived notions on how they are as an employer. Although they have hired some decent people with whom I again have the privilege to work with.
My experience as a technician has been molded by the people I've been surrounded with while having CVS as an employer. I have a lot of positive things to say.
A lot of your experience depends upon how well you interact with the pharmacy team and that specific pharmacy's demographic.
In fact, the gentleman who hired me was a Pharmacist In Charge (PIC) of his own store for and he gave me the opportunity to work as a technician when he didn't have to, which I will forever be grateful for. I had no work experience in health care prior to this opportunity and after gaining essentially an on the job training license through the state of Texas he hired me on (that whole process took about a month and a half; fingerprinting, background check, etc.)
Job work/Life Balance will be dep
ProsThe people you work with as well as the customers, job security, employee discount
ConsStand all day, short break, can be busy and feel overwhelming, no real advancement, unimpressive pay (unless you're the Pharmacist)
I worked at CVS for years. I applied initially for full time and was promised this. I never received full time or benefits in all of the years I worked there. CVS policies state that you have to be SCHEDULED full time on the schedule corporate sees and documents for 9 months to 1 year to receive full time benefits. They would schedule me and my other coworkers just under 30 hours and work us over 30 so they got the full time work without having to supply full time benefits. I worked at multiple locations in various regions. Each store runs the same (as to be expected from corporate). Not only is every store I have worked in understaffed, corporate continues to this day to CUT pharmacy hours. They intended to allot (in one of the very high volume stores I recently worked in) only 60-70 TECH HOURS between 7 technicians. You do the math. That's right that only gives each tech 10 hours. Not that any of the stores pay attention to the schedules anyways. Every store I have had the PLEASURE of working at the pharmacist always tries to keep everyone over their scheduled block of time. They don't ask you if you can stay over they TELL you that you ARE staying over and will threaten your job for trying to leave at or around your SCHEDULED time to leave. For instance, I worked from 9am to 7pm one day and I was kept until CLOSING at 10pm! I NEVER got off on time. The average amount of time I stayed past my shift was 1.5 to 2 hours over. Some of my coworkers and myself would get sick wi
4.0
Certified Pharmacy Technician | Millerton, NY | Nov 9, 2014
Busy retail atmosphere in a corporate facilitated work and training environment
My duties at CVS health alternate between a position in the pharmacy as a pharmacy tech, and a position in the retail portion of the store, as a store associate. When I work in the pharmacy, a typical day of work is never predictable. Duties fluctuate depending on the different workstations I might be assigned to, and workstations alternate throughout the shift. I am often covering the pick-up workstation, where I find and ring out patients prescriptions, in addition to working at production in between customers, which entails counting pills and the first stage of filling prescriptions for the pharmacist. There is also the drop off workstation, where I take and enter prescriptions into the RX database for the pharmacist. This is the most demanding workstation, as many unpredictable snags can come up in trying to fill patients prescriptions through insurance, and thus at times requires extra phone work and coordination with insurance companies, as well as prioritizing these rejections among other tasks. There are always questions and issues and lots of trouble shooting. It can be very chaotic, but also exciting.
In the retail portion of the store I help out both with cash register and floor duties. Most of the time I am working on the floor and assigned to field back up pages when there is heavy traffic. While assigned to the floor I take part in stocking the week's delivery, as well as fielding questions from customers, helping them find products and answering questions a
ProsDental care, Employee Discount, Short Commute
ConsFluctuating hours and Schedule, Unsatisfactory pay, Few Benefits
The CVS 'culture' is more unprofessional than you can possibly imagine. I use the analogy of military training, where they break you down to build you back up. The difference is, at CVS, they don't build you back up. It is their plan not to. It is their plan it break down the pharmacist mentally and undervalue and under mind their professionalism because after all, CVS doesn't view their pharmacists as an asset, but an unwanted expense. Changing their name to CVS HEALTH is a huge front for something that couldn't be more non-health oriented. If they wanted their pharmacist to take on more of a health-professional role, they would staff the pharmacy to accommodate. They can afford it, have you seen the stock lately. Pharmacists are constantly drilled to achieve daily script counts that are impossible because we cant MAKE UP scripts. We are constantly told that we 'CANT AFFORD TO LOOSE A SINGLE SCRIPT' One of the most unmotivating things corporate can do to its leaders is to set goals that are consistently unrealistic and unobtainable. Therefore the CVS culture became inventing new ways to cheat the system and make your numbers look good. We are told to check with other stores that have good numbers, but low and behold they have all been fired due to illegal activity no doubt. The supervisors never would have let someone go who was making them look good with good numbers.
My typical day consisted of 14 hours straight, in the morning, working the drive-thru by myself with no
I worked for the PBM business of CVS Caremark for just under one year, despite what I felt was a darn good pay and benefits package. I was mentally and physically exhausted from losing 50%+ of my nights and weekends and enduring a completely hostile IT management environment. My team was 33% to 50% of the size needed to meet the workload, audit, and regulatory requirements and expectations placed upon us. I like to stay busy, but I did not enjoy being set up to fail. I also felt that the organization moved too hastily, to the point of sloppiness, in providing IT solutions to our internal customers. I am certain it is only a matter of time before a major data loss or other compromising event occurs and makes the news.
My director was a complete and unpredictably volatile a-hole. More than once I witnessed him provide undeserved, public tongue lashings to subordinates who dared to make suggestions with which he didn't agree or, God forbid, criticize anything. For some unknown reason, he took a severe dislike to one particular fellow team member. I watched him marginalize and belittle this good person to the point where he resigned- I believe this was my director's goal. This worker was reliable and competent, and his departure was a loss to the team. This is not how a so-called "director" should behave.
I also witnessed him burn through many, many excellent managers and team leads under him, apparently without the scrutiny of his VPs- how does this happen again and again
ProsPay, benefits.
ConsManagement, workload, work/life balance, unpleasant work environment, everything else.
Sub title: 20th Century Culture in the 21st Century
This was my fourth stint at CVS; three as a temporary employee in other departments and one in an HR call center.
I thought any HR department at CVS headquarters would better embody what the company preaches than say a department on the opposite coast with little interaction with the rest of the company. I was woefully mistaken.
FMLA was our specialty, and knowledge of the Family and Medical Leave Act made most folks their better able to abuse the system. FMLA became "Friday/Monday, and Late Arrival" for them. Attendance was terrible, and in a call center, that means everyone else has to take more calls. Coworkers would use all of their PTO in the first half of the year, then have every excuse under the sun to take more time off. Seems like they catered to low-income single mothers who have young children who struggle working first shift due to doctors appointments etc (I'm a parent of young children myself and found working the early shift tough, but I was there to work not abuse the system or cry about it).
We had 5 members of management in a department of 30 people in a small space. If you needed help on a call or an irate employee requested to speak with a manager, the managers would all dodge taking the call. Instead of face-to-face interaction with someone sitting 10 feet away from you, supervisors would rather hide behind their screens sending emails, and IMs and the like. Managers would not say h
ProsCommute, New-mother friendly, Good amount of entry level jobs
ConsShort breaks, Lack of an Agile/Lean culture, Layoffs, Core values upheld only when convenient, Managerial cattiness, Employees on work visas cherished over local employees
A typical day at work as a pharmacy manager:
Once you've opened the pharmacy, log storage temperatures, and file some paperwork you're expected to review a report reflecting BOH changes for controlled medications. Then, you check email and the workload manager which consists of several random tasks for you to complete, most of which fall under inventory management and state pharmacy regulations. You have to order C2s, returns expired C2s, manage C2 inventory, and file C2 prescription hardcopies. You verify 300+ prescriptions a day, while being expected to use a verification tray and perform MTMs, reconstitute antibiotics, and administer immunizations. You're constantly counseling customers over the phone, and in person. You're expected to check voicemail in less than 15 minutes and take doctor calls, while managing the triage queue which is a screen that includes all third party rejections, eRxs, etc. You have to manage QR which is the request queue with outgoing requests to md offices i.e. refill authorizations, PA requests etc. When requests have been electronically sent out three times with no response, the item goes to your prescriber request queue which requires the Rph to make 20+ calls a day to prescribers. Also, you usually have a few items in your "pharmacist box" like customer requested prescription transfers from competitor pharmacies and random prescriptions written incorrectly that you have to call on for clarification. You also have PCQ calls, and PGN calls t
I worked at CVS as a pharmacy technician and my time there was less than enjoyable.
Although I had completed a Pharmacy Technician Training Course, as well as passed my PTCE, I was still considered a trainee and had to undergo CVS's training program also.
I learned little or nothing from their training program, because during our orientation classes we were mostly taught how to treat the customers so that "we" (the CEO's) can make our profits, then I was expected to work one day every two weeks and be able to know everything needed to know to work in the pharmacy, .
The Front Store management was great, but I never knew what to make of our PIC. I was lied to from interview number one, when I was told I would make more than $8 an hour because of my national certification, and that I would start off at 15-16 hours per week. For two months I worked 6 hours every two weeks, at $8 an hour until I quit.
I had also made it known that I would be keeping my other job, so that I could afford 80 miles round trip to work for them for $8 an hour, and my current boss would be working around my new schedule. He had no problem contacting me every day when modules for the training courses weren't complete, when I had ample time to finish them, but on several occasions, I could not get the hours I needed to keep my bills paid from my other job, because he would take all day to approve our schedule, thereby causing my boss to leave me off the schedule because I was unable to give him any
1.0
Certified Pharmacy Technician | Sherman, TX | Jun 27, 2019
Overall bad experience
Working at this particular CVS Pharmacy was quite awful. First off, the pharmacy manager does not know what he is doing and is very disrespectful towards the pharmacy staff...like to the point where he made an employee cry. Working with him was a nightmare. I could never talk to him or ask him to do something for a customer that was waiting because he would always ignore me for some reason. Part of the problem is that he is always on the phone during his shifts. Other employees said he was on conference calls, but the fact that he was laughing while speaking another language truly says different. Overall, he is just very unprofessional and quite rude. Unfortunately, the store manager is not much different. There have been multiple instances in which I would text my pharmacy manager and/or the store manager for reasons that were pretty serious, and both of them would ignore me. I honestly don't know what was up with these guys and ignoring me and my messages. Some of the employees were nice, while others were very rude and biased. Even though I am a CERTIFIED pharmacy technician, 9 out 10 times I would only be allowed to work the register at the pickup or drive thru. I was never allowed to really do much in production or in the triage. Yet, when one of the former associate store managers decided she wanted to work back in the pharmacy, they let her work the different sections and didn't make her stick to just doing the register...even though she does not yet have her pharmacy
ProsStore discount, good for resume
ConsBlatant favoristims, managers very unprofessional and rude
Looks good at first but make sure you have another job lined up.
I started working for CVS Health in February 2020, right before the Covid-19 pandemic really took hold. At that time, my position was as an Outbound PSR. That job involved mostly calling patients and doctor offices to confirm or schedule medication deliveries, or processing orders placed by patients using our integrated SPRx/SPARCS system.
That wasn't a hard job at all and honestly was enjoyable for me at times. I eventually applied to become a Pharmacy Tech seeing that my current position was due to be merged with the Inbound PSR Call Center team, and I wasn't about to be turned into an underpaid and abused call center rep.
I luckily got transferred and promoted to Tech I in October 2020. We had been working from home since April of that year and I was quite happy to be offered a new position...at first. Most of what I did for the first two months was enter and verify prescriptions sent in via fax or electronically and occasionally call doctors for Rx clarifications or assist with other data entry/project work.
However, after about two months of being a Technician, we learned that upper management arbitrarily decided technicians should be on the phones too because the high turnover with PSR's meant that Pharmacists were getting calls from newbies for non-clinical purposes.
So, I (and most of my team) were thrown on the phones all day to speak to these inbound reps and essentially serve as tech support. This was NOT listed in my job description after the promotion.
Usu
ProsPay is OK
ConsMicromanagement, No Advancement Opportunity, Typical Corporate Lies and Broken Promises.
Questions And Answers about CVS Health
What is the work environment and culture like at CVS Health?
Asked Jun 18, 2016
Hiring 4 people to do the work of 5 is hard enough, 3 to do the work of 5 is exhausting and demoralizing, 2 to do the work of 5 is KILLER! If there's a corporate CONSCIENCE, please take this to heart!
Answered Sep 9, 2021
Please be careful of applying for the health care concierge position. The recruiter left out so many important things what this job really is! The ongoing computer training modules you have to do is beyond anything you can take,it's way too much to do and you get calls on your personal phone everyday about trainings you still need to do,these calls and texts are while your at work trying to work,they are after hours ,after your off the clock ,they are still calling you,texting you and they will email you constantly, and it just seems creepy and ridiculous! Just be careful applying for this position!
Answered Feb 11, 2021
What is the interview process like at CVS Health?
Asked Aug 16, 2016
This is for a Full Time Work from Home Position and All necessary equipment is provided. I applied w/online resume on 11/19/21, received an email to complete a formal resume on 11/19/21, then got a phone call the same day 11/19/21 for a 10minute interview. Received another email on 11/19/21 to schedule a formal WebEx interview. On 11/22/21 had a 1hr 15minute WebEx interview, received a Job Offer on 12/9/21. Background check and Online Onboarding documents were completed on 12/16/21. First day of Training will be in January 2022. Hope this information will be available and helpful to all new applicants and the CVS/Aetna Hiring Process was really Great for me.
Answered Dec 16, 2021
I applied w/online resume on 11/19/21, received an email to complete a formal resume on 11/19/21, then got a phone call the same day 11/19/21 for a 10minute interview. Received another email on 11/19/21 to schedule a formal WebEx interview. On 11/22/21 had a 1hr 15minute WebEx interview, received a Job Offer on 12/9/21. Background check and Online Onboarding documents were completed on 12/16/21. First day of Training will be in January 2022. Hope this information will be available and helpful to all new applicants and the CVS/Aetna Hiring Process was really Great for me.
Answered Dec 16, 2021
What is the best part of working at CVS Health?
Asked Nov 22, 2019
Knowing you make a difference in the elderly patients lives
Answered Sep 3, 2021
Finding a new job.
Answered Nov 30, 2020
What is a typical day like for you at CVS Health?
Asked Mar 16, 2020
Irritating... Because as a shift youre all over the place trying to get things done. Prepare drawers for the day, do deposits, check emails, print out needed info and price changes, open store, soend yhe next four hours trying to maintain the front alone because theres no one there to help until 1pm on weekdays, do voids, answer phones, scan in/out UPS packages, scan in vendor merchandise, western unions, money orders, quikpicks, etc... And youre STILL not valued
Answered Sep 3, 2021
Incredibly hectic. High stress, lots of calls and customers, calling doctors, calling patients, reviewing emails and metrics and conference calls all which you do while verifying scripts and doing immunizations
Answered Dec 2, 2020
How flexible are your working hours at CVS Health?
Asked Mar 16, 2020
Working from home- hours are no flexible at all. The days are long, break are short. They monitor your every move. First 6 months you don’t get any vacation time at all. They only give you 2 floating days and you can used those 2 days only if you need off. The will deny request to be off most of the time.
Answered Aug 14, 2021
Not very. Only 2 pharmacists in the district can be off any given day. You have to get a good partner who can swap with you at times.