Hartford Investment Management Employee Job Reviews in the United States

"Non-Investment Professionals Avoid HIMCO at all costs"

What do you like about working at Hartford Investment Management?

"Separated from the larger Hartord Financial Services, small company (under 500 people currently)."

Do you have any tips for others interviewing with this company?

"Investment professionals are treated well, although you have few standard tools to work with that supplement the major system capabilities. IT People should avoid this company like the plague as you will find little support for the work you will be asked to perform, there is no ability to enhance your skills via training, and career advancement is largely based on cronyism. The annual review system has been used to subvert performance appraisals of those people who are not liked and to pump up current favorites or cronies. Th appraisal system itself was designed for those people fortunate enough to be employed in a perfect world ... i.e. it seems to assume you have all the training, skills, resources and upper management direction and support one would need, yet HIMCO itself is so far from that it is virtually impossible to get a favorable review unless your manager is able to take great liberties with regards to review criteria. Bottom line, might be a good place for individuals who are senior level investment professionals, but only out of financial desperation should anyone consider working here for those not considered an investment professional (IT, Accountant, Audit, Data Grunt, etc.)"

What don't you like about working at Hartford Investment Management?

"Almost total lack of leadership in senior IT management, company management has very low expectations of its IT group and funds it accordingly. Company as a whole not aware of or ignores IT management incompetence, user home grown IT efforts although commendable for attempt to self-serve create a ultra low quality information base to effectively deal with the assets under management. HIMCO was largely responsible for The Hartford's overall poor investment results and poor performance of client portfolios. This is largely due to juvenile approach to businesss processes and management information, both of which are inadequate given the assets under management, and what is available IT wise to an asset manager of this size in the 21st century. To get anything done that requires either funding, or the IT services of The Hartford is downright painful at best, takes an absurd amount of time to consummate, and the flighty priorities of company and IT management do not provide the stability to enable any IT capability that would provide long term benefit. IT investment decisions are based on nothing in general other than the hot issue for the day. I am amazed that both internal and external auditing gives a passing grade to any of the system controls that are supposedly in place given that the are so easily corrupted or circumnavigated. I would estimate HIMCO, as currently organized is over-staffed by about 50-60 people because the antiquated busines processes, and poor quality of management information or points of data consumption require that amount of people to manually process transactional data or fashion reports for management. Current business processes and approach to delivering applications and IT services resemble those that were in vogue in the early 1990's. Ability to rectify poor practices is significantly held back by managements inability to deal with operational issues, people issues, or to recognize poor performing operational practices."

What suggestions do you have for management?

"Management needs to take a hard look at businesss processes and the value they get from IT. Upon close inspection of both, it should be obvious where current management has not delivered adequate support or progress on improving business operations overall. Metric goals should be established to measure and set targets for meaningful improvement of processes overall and compensate management accordingly. The production of management information is borderline horrible given the technologies available today. Thousands of people hours are wasted each year to manually produce this information. This issue alone will prevent and noticeable improvement or ability to grow assets under management to any level beyond what is had today.An investment should be made with regards to mandatory eduction of people in lead or management roles (outside of investment professionals) to begin to build expertise in up to date busines operational practices and techniques, as well as IT skills and practices. It should be noted that IT training is virtually non-existent at HIMCO and is handed out to cronies or favorites of IT management with no regard to career development of employees or the needs of the business."