Senior Consultant - Anonymous employee Protiviti Employee Review

At the corporate level -Attaching to the parent company RHI seems a debatable long-term strategy especially at the present time. Having RHI's resource pool and network accessible benefits Protiviti a lot for its pitching and staffing effort but its own brand name gets overshadowed in return. It proves to be smart move for the company founders to choose join RHI in earlier days as a leverage to control risks and grow rapidly after their predecessor Arthur Anderson went under, but keeping that relationship confused everyone going forward to some degree. Are you a staffing company or a consulting company? There should be distinctions between the two not by size but by nature of work. Protiviti has to be able to answer this question well because lots of work are in fact staff augmentation work, which is not consulting and offers little career development opportunities. It is suspected the two organizations could have competing/conflicting priorities in its ongoing relationship. At the end of the day, the parent company, a public company, cares more about how much a sub would fatten to its bottom line or help achieve its vision at the parent level, which inherently makes for a hard argument for Protiviti to preserve and promote a true consulting company's entrepreneurship. When the sub represents only a fraction of a line item of the parent's book, who would win the arm twisting game is obvious. - Cannt only keep picking low hanging fruits forever - most work are still associated with SOX/Internal Audit. Those projects are less technical and generally yield low fees. It is a must entry point to enterprise risk management space but most people find it less challenging and stimulating after a couple years. Company needs to diversify solutions more aggressively by recruiting strong solution leaders and building a good support system to develop resources internally afterwards. Some MDs and senior managements easily found their complacent to milk the work carried from AA and satisfied with just keeping those clients content. In the last couple years the executives however have put in efforts in this regard but in reality too slow o manifest a promising result. For higher billable work in specialized areas for both process and IT, clients run to other companies. This is one of the reasons for many top talents to leave b/c they realize they will be pigeon holed to solely SOX/IA after a few years and not easy to break out that mold. At the office/regional level - Pay is below market competitive rate. Make senses bc the company makes most $ from low fee work. You do get the title faster but the compensation progression is slow, and yes very slow. This is one reason other places have to discount the titles you got here. - Extremely high turnover and people who stay get punished for work that quitters left behind. No true reflection from management to acknowledge/appreciate loyalty and rally up morale so as to retain talents. This leads to a vicious cycle with more people leaving. - Middle managements and MDs are incompetent in terms of business development capabilities. Again when work are mainly driven by SOX/IA there is little room for them to distinguish themselves from competitors except pitching lower fees with whiter teeth. - Generally people are nice and cultures are comfortable but the same everywhere, office politics is present. Empowered mid/sr managers attempt to corner peers or upandcoming comers, and find themselves have better chances to win staffing decisions, have louder voices to submit performance feedback, snatches sales credits etc. It is a fair game and losers died trying.