Hanover Research reviews

It's best to leave Hanover after you've gotten some good experience under your belt through the Content Director role. After that, additional promotions are added stress with very little value-add. Beyond the CD role, leaders manage far too many people, which essentially becomes your full-time job on its own on top of your actual regular responsibilities. If you're looking to build a fruitful research career, taking a promotion after the CD role is a bad move as you will quickly move away from touching anything related to research and find your research skills lacking when you eventually move to a more established research company. As soon as a retention issue comes along and you find your team short-staffed (which happens very often), you will quickly be taking on the workloads of multiple people, which feels highly chaotic. If one person leaves or even just takes family leave, 30 clients need to be redistributed across a fairly small team, and that assumes everyone is available to actually take those clients. This has compounding effects whenever a mass exodus happens. At a broader level, Hanover is also afraid of losing people to the point it retains staff that are a drain on the team much more so than other reputable companies. Addressing performance issues is nearly impossible, and leaders are assumed to be in the wrong when flagging that staff need coaching support (or need to be let go). This has broader ramifications for the rest of the team to pick up the slack when workloads are already really high. The time off and flexibility is great, but the pay is well below the market average. There has been talk for some time of benchmarking salaries against the market, but that never seemed to come to fruition. A lateral career move to another company will most often yield a 30-40% pay raise. If you're eligible for a bonus, you need to be manually tracking it yourself because it will likely be calculated incorrectly every year, which will cost you thousands.

The culture on the sales team is horrendous. I can recall numerous colleagues whom I developed relationships with, myself included, that legitimately had to go on antidepressants while in seat as it was that toxic and draining. Massive internal issue surrounding seniority and authority, with job security consistently on the line and alluded to by mid/upper management, even in group settings via emails to the BDA team or in team meetings. Turnover was extremely common, with a few people coming and going each month. Something clearly isn't working nor motivating any associates to succeed, they are consistently pressured to input robotic and borderline harassing outreach metrics to get hold of clients (ex. scraping sketchy websites and finding personal cell phone numbers for C-suite executives was an everyday norm and expectation, using fake VOIP numbers to dial from random cities, recording of our cold call conversations with prospects without any mention of consent, etc.). I was in seat for over a year before transitioning roles and was consistently in the top 50% of associates performance-wise, yet made less than $100 dollars a month on average in commission and was told during the hiring process the AVERAGE would be around 8-10K a year. As an above average performer, I can generously say I made around $2000/year in commission at most, with the extra few hundred bucks here and there coming from deals closed by my respective director originating from meetings I had scheduled. For context, this barely pays the bills for anyone living in the DC area and candidly, it was hard at times. The aggressive culture stems from the mid, upper, and executive level management, which has been expressed by several of my colleagues as well as myself at times during my time at Hanover with no change. Diversity both from a demographics perspective and from diversity of thought is also a mess. They constantly mention means to improve this, saying how proud leadership is by patting themselves on the back for implementing little things like charity matching for specific, pre-chosen leftist non-profits or implementing company observed holidays for Juneteeth and Indigenous People's Day, but I will always remember this one time on a company-wide all hands call the CHRO came on and presented this entire initiative to double the referral bonus for any candidates we submit that identified as BIPOC, LGBTQ+, or Veterans. Really inappropriate and uncomfortable sentiment that did not sit well with me nor my colleagues whatsoever and I’m surprised this was acceptable. I write this entire thread in hopes that Hanover reflects and refines from the several issues expressed above and to hopefully attract prospective employees that are willing or looking to make a massive impact and culture change, as this is a major issue impacting sales and the team needs to reform how they’re thinking to achieve the caliber of success that they want.