It's not a perfect job, but it's a well-paying job
Pros
Look, everyone at GLG knows about the Glassdoor reviews, and everyone's known a disgruntled employee who left on poor terms and contributed a scathing criticism. A lot of the criticism is a natural side effect of GLG's target demographic: 23 year olds from rich parents & pedigree who have no prior work experience. To be fair, GLG has historically done a bad job at accurately marketing the role, which has led to the wrong people in the wrong positions. However, a lot of the criticisms posted here (including those written by people I know) essentially boil down to, "I'm very upset that I have a manager who's allowed to make demands on my time and hold me accountable when I underperform." To anyone considering working here, I'd advise you to take the reviews of more junior employees (<1 year) with a grain of salt. There's a reason the company's retention rate is higher for those who come to GLG with prior work experience. Anyway, here's what the past few years with GLG have taught me: It's not a perfect company, but it's not a bad job. GLG offers a nice working space, competitive benefits, competitive (if not inflated) salary, and an accelerated track for people & account management. Within 2-3 years, employees can expect to be managing a small team, with another 2-3 years putting you on track to manage several teams and manage huge portions of your division's accounts. While the skills you're learning are mostly qualitative (professional communication, negotiation, time management, people management), these play nicely into a resume for future management roles. Working in the Research segment is an on-call role, and nights and weekends are frequently interrupted by client demand, but the company pays well for your time. For some people, the trade-off isn't worth it, so think critically about the value you place on leaving at 5pm + not replying to emails on weekends. There are some excellent people at GLG who love their jobs, and I've been lucky enough to work for/with them. My days are busy and work always bleeds over into the next day, but I'm in constant dialogue with people around me about their weekends, pets, bad dates, and newest Netflix binges. When I joined the company, we sat in cubicles and no one spoke to each other in a cramped office with no perks. Now, I have a beautiful view of downtown, a free coffee bar, and healthy work friends. The management is getting better, and the work hours are getting better as accounts are finally staffed appropriately. There have been rocky periods, but overall I think the company is becoming a better place to work. I don't do the work out of passion, but that's the reality of most jobs. Work hard, network well, and the company will continue to pay you more than most of your peers with the same skill set at other firms.
Cons
My experience isn't universal, and there are some truly, TRULY terrible managers at GLG. These are the bad apples who don't let their employees take lunch, sick days, or vacation. (By the way, GLG -- your "no minimum vacation" policy is actively harmful when it means some employees take 30+ vacation days annually and other employees take 0, with NO ACCOUNTABILITY to the managers allowing this.) This isn't unique to GLG, but it is something the company must continue to work on if it intends to retain talent and improve these mixed Glassdoor reviews. There's a decent amount of flexibility to transfer to new teams IF the company thinks you're going to stick it out another 1-2 years, but I'm sympathetic for those who have tried to escape awful managers and been denied. Likewise, there are teams that are overstaffed and consistently blow past arbitrarily set goals despite leaving at 4pm every day, and teams that are understaffed, overworked, and penalized when they fall short of unreasonably high targets. The divide breeds resentment, and the aggressive growth rate isn't sustainable for all clients. GLG could attempt to solve for this (and overall work/life balance) with a queue system for new requests and follow-the-sun staffing, but still has far too much pride in how their elite clients value the account managers. It's not true, employees know it isn't true, but the antiquated idea persists. I'm hopeful it will change in the next 3-5 years. GLG's technology is abhorrently dysfunctional and frequently causes huge losses and mass employee frustration & panic. It's not uncommon for all systems to shut down, and new programs to be rolled out before being properly beta-tested. Compensation is directly tied to metrics, but those metrics can be hard to find and riddled with errors in the reporting. Employees spend countless hours building complicated Excel sheets to manage the most basic client data so we can have some hope of getting accurate numbers. There's a rumor that the CTO hired a team of his dev buddies to run things, and I have no idea if that's true, but it's the most plausible explanation for how terrible our systems are. Guys, I'm trying my very best here, but you've got to give us some better tools to work with. Lastly, GLG definitely has a diversity problem. The straight white Ivy frat boys who keep getting hired don't even like the job, because all of their buddies went directly to Wall Street or sexy marketing roles and are making better money. As long as the recruitment strategy continues to target top tier schools and rely heavily on referrals, this won't change. GLG just hired an experienced CHRO, so my hopes are up about the future of the gender/race demographics in the office, but this is a serious issue that's remaining solidly in the con category for now.
