Pros
They are committed to adopting the WELL building standard in-house, although a bumpy adoption, operations are changing on local levels in Chicago, London and Miami. Active teaming workplace and technology in the Chicago office are fantastic for flexibility of work modes. Interesting and passionate people.
Cons
HKS is a Dallas-centric firm. They are striving to be better at empowering some of their regional office (Chicago being one of them) to be leaders in design, but the inertia of their HQ to utilize regional offices as production houses is strong. The Chicago location is relatively new to the market and slow to understand the competitiveness of hiring here, but their commitment to a budding culture and transparency is getting better. Employee base pay is very low in roles below VP and bonus structure is not transparent. Promotion process is very confusing and promotions often come without significant raises. Administrative employees are expected to wear too many hats to be effective and office management is not very supportive or tuned in to what it actually takes to run a global design studio, making it unnecessarily difficult. Dallas still sees administrative roles as ‘secretarial’ and do not honor forward-thinking or the technical competency of contemporary administrative professionals. Like any design firm in Chicago, there are fantastic and passionate people that are great to work with, but do not expect to be rewarded if you challenge management. They have a new firm wide directive to cull people who do not ‘fit the culture’, despite not really understanding what that is yet or taking a hard look at not-so-healthy people who have been with the company for a long-time. Construction administration (CA) practices are particularly archaic and there are a couple HKS-lifers in the Chicago office that are very unprofessional and toxic, especially toward women. Caution to anyone considering any administrative role, as expectations are not clear and respect for women is sorely lacking from local and firm wide management. You will be expected to handle or assist with everything from reception, HR, IT, Marketing, BD, CA and office management without the proper title, authority or pay.
