C Space reviews

Politics, not merit, dictate career advancement in client services. - Department managing directors had pet associate consultants (second lowest position) reporting into them. Intended reporting structure is two levels up (associate to senior, senior to director, director to VP/managing director). - Performance reviews were inconsistent, subjective (you self-select who will review your performance from your teams, and both the tool and performance matrix have no numerical score for benchmarking purposes), and cringe-worthy. I had a teammate with flawless performance be told they wasn't being considered for a promotion because they weren't more like X consultant in the department. Staffing/Workload - C Space is a hair on fire agency that is most likened to a boot camp. Approximately through the associate director level, expect to work 10ish hours a day and about three full weekend days. HR/dept directors will cry foul here but set up an informational interview with someone who has left C Space to get an accurate picture. Unless you have children, you will stay to finish the work. Terrible/non existent manager training. If you have a bad manager here, get out as soon as you can. Politics again rear its head here - a top performing senior consultant was put on a performance plan because she was observed to be consistently 3-5 minutes late to her meetings (never mind she was managing 3 accounts and 2 teams herself flawlessly). Beware the Kool Aid. It's quite strong. Senior leadership seems committed to its values without prioritizing market level compensation, L2/L3 management training and continued ed, and managing director/VP servant leadership. Abysmal associate/associate consultant training. If you're new to market research or fresh out of college, strongly recommend against coming here. There are plenty of other bigger, more established brands with better thought-out learning tracks AND better starting salaries. This was the experience of associates before me, my own cohort (who has all left), and three L1s who joined a year after me. I don't foresee this changing.

The culture is toxic. Most of the company staff is tenured high-level employees coasting through the work week or new associate/associate consultants lacking experience. They have a huge retention problem, especially when it comes to overworked mid-level employees. They say they have hired over 100 people this year, which means that 20-25% of the company hasn't even been working there for a year. You can expect a high stress, disorganized environment with long hours and low pay. Upper management is a lot of talk when it comes to improving these issues, however I never saw any improvements during my time at C Space. Instead they continued to sell business that could be properly staffed. HR's responses to the negative reviews are not what I experienced at C Space and I find the other low starred reviews to be accurate.