account manager

account executive

implementation consultant

software engineer

recruiter

Paylocity

Coming into a new industry is always challenging, and I thought I was ready to face the challenge. 

We went through a 90 day training that we completed, but didn't prepare us for the job or tasks that we were about to have to do. It was challenging to follow the trainer anyway as there were constant side conversations in between We came out of training not understanding the process, we were all lost. I had the impression that we were going to be placed in an incubator with extra support and get assigned a mentor as we were told. We did not. We got thrown in during the busiest time of the year, year end. Trying to get questions answered was nearly impossible because everyone else was attempting to get their clients taken care of. 

 On that note, watch out for recruiting. They will tell you that you get a raise after the first 6months, and another raise at the year mark. What they fail to tell you is that you get the raise at 6months ONLY if your KPIs are what the company wants them to be and if you take a training and pass. Which clearly if you had a rough training experience, meeting those KPIs to qualify for the progression training is unlikely and naturally your year increase is also affected. 

Our days were filled with zoom meeting with customers, managers, trainings, and we still had to find the time to complete the updates that we needed to do for our client accounts. Most of the time it would take longer because we had to research the things that we didn't know, and it was all expected to be done in 40hrs for "work/life balance" because during this time they decided they didn't want any one to work overtime because it wasn't warranted. However, they still expected for us to have things completed on time to meet the quota.  If any of you reading this has done balancing balancing before you know that it is a time consuming process, especially for an inexperienced IC.

I feel that management was not supportive and even if they assisted, if things went wrong the responsibility was given to the IC.  They made us take responsibility for our training, but gave no guidance.  They didn't know their people and what their strengths/weaknesses were. The main focus was on the KPIs that didn't really give them a picture of the progress or improvement a person made. It also created more work because we had to update the system, it wasn't easy to figure out how to use it, opening up new tickets was tricky.  The daily meetings set up to help us was intimidating to ask questions because they explained things as if we already had been in the industry for years, when it should've been broken down for a beginner. It was so difficult to learn the concepts needed to do the job because I feel the right personalities are not in leadership positions.  There were no accommodations or adjustments made for my disability despite informing management. We reached out to our team and unless we made a big deal about it, it would take multiple times to get answers. 

Despite all of the mentioned things I experienced, the culture outside of the position is fantastic. So if you are able to survive your 1st year successfully and not get on any of your management/leads bad side, you have the opportunity to transfer to a more reasonable position within the organization. I felt that they had great benefits, and contributed to the communities. The product that they have is a great product and solution for many companies.  What would make the company even better is if upper management cared about how the employees were treated, valued and felt. 

What I learned from this experience is that if there is such blatant disregard for the employees, move on sooner because it won't get any better. I also got a great fundamental understanding of what payroll implementation was about on my own, so I learned to celebrate myself, because out of this entire year I only heard what I was doing right 1 time. 

Some points:

-Lack of employee support during high volume periods with management pushing for delayed resolutions rather than actual problem solving. Employees are punished for taking the time to assist in complicated situations arising from other departments failing to meet needs (e.g. Tax department, despite months of notice, often will fail to proper implement new local tax codes for the new year, resulting in botched payrolls for hundreds of client- you are discouraged from assisting in depth because "calls are waiting"- but this is PAYROLL Peoples pay, including union members. Tax team will say that they are "working on it", but also not acknowledge that this should have been  something taken care of in advance because- you know, we already got notice months ago?  You will have pressure from the clients you're assigned and a conflicting pressure from your managers at Paylocity, which is incredibly frustrating for someone who actually cares about servicing clients properly.

-Promotion is very much socially based and not performance based. The staff pool is very romantically incestuous at this point, and it is all also very gossip heavy. Personally, a lot of the personalities, especially the higher you look, came across as toxic individuals and not people I'd like to connect with outside of work because they aren't good people.  

-Metric obsession. Don't be fooled- this is basically just an average call center because you'll constantly be reminded of how long your calls run, how long people are on hold, how long it takes you to respond to an email/ticket. The problem is, payroll support can be ALL OVER THE PLACE, obviously. Very niche situations that can take up tons of time. It's not really a business suited to the format in which they insist of forcing it into, resulting in subpar service that continually gets worse year over year (Speaking as someone who has now also been on the client side since leaving Paylocity). 

-Lots of money and energy spent on the office space- which is why they resisted W@H adoption. My understanding is they've improved here, but they also still have some out of touch policies. That said, the building is decent, though parts of it are dated. Paylocity's floors are all remodeled, open environment. All desks are standing adjustable, there's lots of little work nooks, and you can theoretically work anywhere you'd like at the office building. 

- Siloes exist across the company but make things break across the company, making siloing useless. Implementation is separate from support, and they are incentivized to rush and promise as much as possible, but once a client goes live, its crickets on their end and forced onto support (who has no idea what's going on because the people who do just took their hands off). Benefits setup - a different team. Tax- separate. With all of these, though there's also no transparency on an internal level. Management seems unwilling to properly collaborate with other departments where things could flow efficiently and if you call out an issue or suggesting, it likely will be unwelcome and possibly negatively received. Lots of egoes running around...

- On the client end, they see their dedicated account managers change quite a bit. What is happening on the backend with this? Well, if someone leaves, they just dump all those clients everyone else. There's no opportunity to speak with the prior AM to get a sense of the client and their needs, so you're constantly fighting to build relationships and running into "frustration traps" that are completely unnecessary. 

I took a pretty significant pay cut to join Paylocity towards the end of March. The interviews really made it sound like an awesome place to work, they were up front about the heavy workload towards the end of the year, and the benefits/time off were pretty great. 

Again, the time off and benefits were solid. I applaud Paylocity for understanding that time off and mental health days are critical in anyone's success. They also managed to allow for remote work, which is greatly appreciated during COVID. My manager and Team Lead were stellar in helping me and providing me with honest feedback. The work itself was satisfying, when things went smoothly. 

If you're interested in getting into Payroll and are okay with juggling many, many projects with varying levels of client willingness to provide you with what you need to succeed, you can and will do great here. Had my workload been more manageable, I could've seen myself progressing rather quickly through the company.

What Paylocity was not upfront about were the following:
1.) Overtime is pretty much a requirement each and every week in order for you to get caught up, if you're in the Implementation Consultant role. You're given far more work than you can handle, especially only being out of training for less than 6 months. 
2.) If you have an unplanned sick day, prepare to make up the work you missed, resulting in more overtime.
3.) There are more clients being sold solutions than there are ICs to handle the workload, and when you bring this up to leadership/management, they tell you they hear you, but it doesn't quite sound like anyone is actually listening.
4.) The lack of support is extremely frustrating. There were times when I'd ask a question after using all the provided resources, and I'd sometimes wait up to 6 hours to get a response. This would in turn require me to stay late/work overtime to get an integral piece of my project done.
5.) Some Sales Reps were blatantly dishonest to their clients about what us ICs could do, and more importantly WHEN we could do it. They would "accidentally" put the wrong project completion dates in, and would then ask in front of clients, "can you make this date work"? There was near zero accountability for this, and if you gave any pushback, some Sales Reps would actually reach out to their Director, and your Manager, to complain. 
6.) The stress is extremely high, and many are prone to being burnt out very quickly.
7.) At one point during my first 4 months of employment, I had a total of 20 clients. This is absurd for a newbie to handle. Yes, I was told I was doing a great job, and yes, my clients were all happy and thankful, but I felt like I was being rewarded with more work.

I've got a strong background in Org Comm, and I can honestly say that I felt like they were focusing more on the profit goals than they were on their frontline employees. 

If you compensate your employees a little better for the stress/workload they take on, and if you choose to not just "hear" your struggling employees and actually "listen" to them and focus on them a little more, you would have an ideal work culture and would retain more hardworking employees. I highly recommend Paylocity invests a lot more into a full-on Communicative Consultation to really understand what's going on at the frontline, as I feel there was a severe lack of understanding of just what the struggles were.

Overall, if you’re looking for a decent 9-6 that doesn’t pay especially well but provides standard benefits, being an Account Manager with Paylocity may be perfect for you. If you’re able to clock out and leave work at the office, you’re in an even better position. 

If you care about finding solutions and providing substantial guidance to your clients, there will always be more work for you to do. The main purpose this position serves is to satisfy the 4 hour service-level agreement in each Paylocity client’s contract. Although I’m sure there are account managers that have been pushed out of the company due to providing especially poor levels of service, your job is extremely secure, as account managers are continuing to be assigned more clients to oversee than they can manage, and management has very little concern for “the client experience” until continued poor service creates issues they can’t ignore. Unfortunately, the squeaky wheel gets the grease in terms of Paylocity clients receiving adequate support for their issues in using Paylocity’s platform. 

New middle-management prioritizes standard corporate BS to “become more efficient” (ie. implementing WFM to be able to change assigned schedules to accommodate peak volume) in ways that do not align with the actual work being done, and most of the changes to an account manager’s day-to-day job over the past year have done nothing for account managers other than exacerbate the existing understaffing issues. Management often cites an increased rate of new client acquisition when trying to provide a reason for the inflated workload/ book of business, but a general lack of funding is then noted as the reason that our talent acquisition can’t keep up proportionally. Shareholders should love this in the short-term, but it comes entirely at the cost of Paylocity’s client-facing employees. 

Even with the $1000 referral bonus they’ve always offered, I could not recommend this job to any friends/family in good conscience. 

I came here being sold falsehoods expectations of what the Account Manager job is. This is definitely a call center job, which is not how it was explained. Back to back calls and emails nonstop. It's impossible to keep up and you will find yourself drowning in emails and calls all day long. When asking veteran AMs how they've kept up all this time, we're told they do things such as work emails during break and lunches and often work overtime just to keep up. We're also told that the company has gotten so much more busy over the past years and the company refuses to try new things to help with the volume. The turnover rate is so high, as I started with a group of nearly 30 total new hires, and it's only about 5 or so of us left, due to overload of work and poor expectations. The training was subpar and didn't really help with the type of broad questions you'll get on the floor, so you're constantly getting questions you have no answer for, and can very often not be able to find the answer without a follow up call or email, which since you're on the phones all day, there's really no time for follow ups. Clients are often upset with follow up times and ticket times, but it's the norm due to the different department's not being able to keep it with the work. You get project time to work on cases, but is not nearly enough. A lot of clients want complex requests that require more research so you'll find yourself only having time to work on 1 or 2 cases at the most. I only average 1.5 minutes between calls so there's really just no time to get anything done without staying way past clock out time everyday. The culture itself is nice and they do give you free stuff often, but that doesn't make up for the asinine amount of work that you are expected to get though.  You will find yourself turning into a robot here fairly quickly. They tell us year end is even worse so I expect to see even more drop offs during that time. I hear other job roles here outside of client services are better, but the Account Manager role is NOT the place to be if you value your sanity.

As a former Account Manager at Paylocity, I want to share my experience for those considering a role here.

Paylocity brands itself as a modern, forward-thinking company—something akin to a tech-savvy, people-first culture like Google. In reality, my day-to-day experience felt much more rigid, corporate, and heavily metrics-driven. Over time, it became increasingly micromanaged, with an intense focus on analytics and KPIs that often came at the cost of employee well-being.

One of the biggest challenges I faced was the lack of consistency in leadership decisions. Strategic shifts were frequent and sometimes sudden, leading to confusion and difficulty in long-term planning. Internal communication between departments and executives could also be disjointed, which impacted team efficiency.

The culture appeared to evolve frequently, and not always in ways that aligned with its advertised values. Morale was affected, and there seemed to be growing frustration among employees about shifting priorities and policies.

While I can't speak to legal matters or internal investigations, I am aware of public discussions online from former employees and clients who have shared their concerns. Some of these have gained attention on platforms like Reddit and TikTok. These posts highlight a growing desire for accountability and transparency, especially from those who may not have the same financial security to stay silent.

That said, I did work with some talented and supportive peers, and there are individuals at Paylocity who genuinely care about doing the right thing. However, in my experience, the environment didn't support long-term growth or employee wellness in the way I had hoped.

I encourage anyone considering a role here to research carefully, ask detailed questions during interviews, and assess whether the company’s current culture aligns with your personal values and working style.


I've been with Paylocity for 2 years at this point and I was honestly super excited and LOVED working for Paylocity for about my first year, performance was great and was promoted into one of the other tiers, not a lot of turnover in management until recently. 

It's very obvious that some managers/team leads have it together and some don't. They try to work with you as best as they can if you have questions/personal issues come up but it seems very fake about 90% of the time and the conversations end up taking round-about ways to "you should always be here for your clients" - regardless of what happens to you as a person - and your management can be really hard to get in touch with, especially if there's an urgent client need - often resulting in you having to make decisions then being berated for acting independently out of being forced to.

While I can understand the business needs - it seems Paylocity is growing faster than it can realistically service their accounts and tries to blame it on their Client Services not responding/handling items quick enough when reality the Client Services department requires alot of partnership with back-end teams that don't have the resources to handle the workloads they are being given, resulting in backed up times for client requests and escalations from the clients - nothing is worse than getting yelled at for something that is not your fault.

The phrase "Dedicated Account Manager" is partially a lie as they moved away from this model for some of their lower tier clients and about 70-80% of the time - you don't directly speak to your clients unless you specifically go out of your way to setup a meeting with them.

To be honest, my opinion of Paylocity has only gone down the longer I've worked here which is really a shame because I thought I had finally found a company I could stick with for the long haul. 



Let me start off by sharing, I was extremely excited to start a new career here.  Sadly,  that  ended faster than it even began. 

They definitely entice you with the culture, and great personalities.  They promise lots of support and who you will be able to reach out too for help during training and afterwards.  I was definitely impressed.  However, once training started I quickly realized I was in a position that was not appropriately explained- not even close.  The job description stated the basics of what they did, and alluded to having great training, and once the training began it was so far off and a completely different job than the title I applied for.  Not kidding, what they expected you to do was something most people go to collage for and want this path for a career.  In no way did my resume state I had those qualifications or background to successfully do this job.  As you can imagine, during the first days of training I had that holy cow what is happening moment. I was extremely frustrated, sad, baffled and confused at how on earth I even got past the interview.  Shame on me for not asking more questions, but I also don’t believe this was my responsibility as I am not the expert in the job and I expected to be told those job descriptions and expectations. Because believe me, I wouldn’t have accepted the job.  Terrible way to start a training and to feel incredibly lost and discouraged. This was much more than just the typically overwhelming feeling of a new job.  And to be very honest, this job did not nearly pay close to what it should be for what they expected.  I could tell they loved to advertise the work life balance- however I don’t think I would have been able to enjoy that at all with the type of job it was.  Very very disappointing! 

I will start by saying the company as a whole had great benefits and a lot to offer as far as career and future wise .I.e 401, stock options ect . However the position itself for account manger is a joke . They tell you in the interview 80% on phone 20%email that is NOT the case . You are expected to take calls as well as respond to several emails you get PER DAY and also doing outbound call backs or videos for your clients and if you cannot clear your dashboard for those emails the company put it’s on YOU stating you have to balance your workload better . Also training does not even begin to cover any of the calls you will receive it is as helpful as it can be though . You are sold false dreams in training of how production will be all the managers will come in the class once a week for a team meeting stating they will be their for you once you get on the floor and have an open door policy those are lies . Once you are on  the floor literally sink or swim environment . Management refuses to help and tells you to put your questions in chat that NEVER get answered , if you accept this job prepare to handle and be the middle man for TAXES,HR,BENEFITS,401k ect . They will make you create help tickets for those individual teams instead of just being able to transfer your client to the appropriate team  . You will be told you are starting with mid size small business clients my first time taking calls it was a million dollar client .Look past the free food benefits and wonderful training . This position is draining no way for you to know it all but expected to find the answer but the resources provided are not up to date and the “help line “ will help but they will also tell your manager if you call them BEFORE reading an article that doesn’t help you or the client first LOL.BEWARE of this position ! 

When I first joined Paylocity it was probably the best job I have ever joined. The benefits and pay were great! The work was not hard to keep up with. Recently they went through management changes and implemented a new WFM that completely has destroyed my view of my future of working here. 

Your schedule is can change based on the client call volume at any given time.  If you are not in the correct status is possible for you to get a warning while in the mean time you still have to meet with your clients which aren’t programmed into this new system. If you are in the account manager II position. You have the most work and are not expected to work overtime however that is the only way to keep up with the current workload. What used to be an average phone call count as 15 is now risen to nearly 30 calls per day during year end. The year end was so bad that they took away any time to focus on email which caused many people’s metrics to decrease and was hard to maintain if you didn’t work overtime. 

An additional problem is you cannot get a hold of your team lead or manager. You have to continuously teams them for an answer. The only support you get is through peers. If you an a client who wants to speak to a manager on the phone it’s very hard to get in touch with one. I waited 30 minutes before giving up and telling the client we will give them a call back. Another problem is that team leads are constantly moving to support teams so you don’t really have someone who helps you grow into your position. I have gone through 8 team leads. You get escalated clients because there is constantly a change in account managers and the client has never spoken to their AM or has been escalated because of that AM. 

I would not recommend this job until management has changed. 

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