ruthless idiots - Analyst Nielsen Employee Review

1.0
Nov 5, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

the Nielsen name on your resume, which isn't even worth very much any more. Your power point and excel grunt-work skills will be great after a few months here. By then you will also have more than enough material to write your own dilbert comic strip series.

Cons

Extremely cutthroat environment. rampant scapegoating, rumors, lots of people throwing each other under the bus, and trying to escape the blame because most of the products have chronic issues and the data is always screwed up (business units like BASES and OCR have better product & data quality but culture issues still remain). It doesn't help that people here also take themselves and their jobs way too seriously. Clients often return data; even the non-research/data clients find glaring mistakes on a regular basis. Several syndicated products are in such poor shape that every single year they have a team of black belts come in, spend a week putting up post-it notes and reformulating all their processes, but inevitably nothing helps and the exact same thing happens next year. The roots of this culture go back to the management history; after the company was saddled up with debt and sold to private equity, they wanted to do anything they could to cut costs, recoup their money, and have a successful IPO. During that period before the IPO, which lasted several years, clearly managements priority was milking the business enough to have a strong IPO, not running or growing it in a way that was any way sustainable. Those same management practices have continued. The only 2 circumstances I would recommend working for this company - 1) if you are a huge jerk you will fit right in, or 2) if you are a fresh college grad who has gotten into the Emerging Leaders Program, AND don't have a better offer elsewhere. That rotational program actually provides quite a bit of exposure to different businesses and can be a good experience.

Explore other reviews about Nielsen

5.0
Apr 14, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Was a great job with great benefits

Cons

No cons at all honestly

1.0
Apr 16, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Absolutley nothing. Which is a tragedy, because Nielsen was once an absolutely great place to work. I wanted to retire here. The culture used to be great, and I really loved being a part of this place. I loved my team, my management, and the people. Then along came the current CEO who is the classic example of a person who knows the cost of everything, but the value of nothing. He took over and ran the company full speed ahead in to the iceberg. And to try and save the sinking ship, he laid off literally thousands of highly experienced, highly trained, and highly engaged people to replace them with fresh overseas hires who know nothing about the company and expect them to be trained from the ground up to replace literally centuries of collective expererience and client relations. It's a disaster. This CEO shouldn't be trusted to run a lemonade stand.

Cons

Everything. Pay, job security, culture, management. Nothing is good here anymore. Don't take a job here unless you are truly desperate. And even then, it should only be as a stop-gap until you can find something else.

5
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