Great Place to Develop Before Springboarding Elsewhere
Pros
The people here are outstanding and incredibly creative strategists and thinkers who are passionate about what they do - this makes showing up everyday and doing the work enjoyable. I left with a lot of close personal friends and excellent professional connections. The work is interesting and engaging. Even though workloads can get to be high at times, the content you work on helps ease the number of hours you may have to work. Most clients are fantastic to work with, and the retainer model gives you opportunities to build strong, meaningful relationships with clients to better drive the work. Senior leaders on Content teams also genuinely care about staff personally and care about their development. Leaders often focus on how to implement retention strategies and keep people around and keep people engaged/happy. This comes from a place of true caring and concern for the team and not just bottom line interests. If you're a strong performer or even if you show that you're invested in the work, you will do well here and be well supported. There is also a lot of support and autonomy to drive your own career. If you have an interest you want to pursue, you will likely have opportunities to explore that interest without too much red tape.
Cons
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.
