Great place to boost your PR career and awesome culture!
Pros
Great place to push your boundaries, experiment and succeed! My manager (senior lead in my department) gave comprehensive and ongoing feedback and expressed recognition when goals were exceeded. Salary and benefits are competitive for the local market (in Latin America, apparently not the same for California based colleagues). Team oriented culture, a lot of autonomy and opportunities to take your ideas to the next level. Very PR focused company, and a great company to do comms and PR. Incredible passion for what they do, their products, games, and company history. Very talented people in the Game Development teams and international publishing teams (Marketing, PR, Community, Biz Dev, etc) Work life balance is decent My team leader and senior regional leader encouraged team members to be bold and not to be afraid of trying new things. It's a great way to do "creative and bold" marketing and PR. Robust onboarding process. A lot of trust from middle management in the regions.
Cons
Interview process, hiring and oboarding can be tough for international workers where Blizzard does not have robust physical operations. Mine took over 6 moths for example. Company is improving in this regard and dealing with this growing pains however. Small teams and flat structures... this is usually a plus! BUT in this case that puts serious limits on your options to grow and be promoted, specially in PR and Comms team, unless you relocate overseas. A lot of confusion on what "Global" and "U.S" functions are, as an American company both terms are usually confused, particularly when developing "Global" plans and activities that in any other company would be considered solely "U.S. focused". North America (aka Global) teams while well intentioned, lacks understanding of other markets dynamics and global trends. Several managers and even directors in senior positions (mostly in HQ) got there after many years in the company but lack advanced management skills or even technical skills gained through previous work in other leading global cutting-edge companies... IMHO talent/skills/exp. in middle management can be improved. I used to do a mental exercise back when I was at Blizzard: if we were at a meeting and at the table we had the "Global (Marketing, PR, Communications, Biz Dev) Manager" from Blizzard (or one of our franchises) and at the same table we had the same/equivalent roles from other leading tech/digital companies (Amazon, Disney, Netflix, AirBnB, LinkedIn, Universal, Facebook, Apple, etc.) ... would we (Blizzard) have the best or at least top 5 best qualified and brilliant professional in the table? Most of the times I answered myself: I highly doubt it (not even close).
