Good Peer Work Environment, Bad Pay (Workday Practice)
Pros
If you are working out of Dallas, there is a great office culture with a number of bright, motivated, and fun people who all graduated from school in the last 5 years. Lower to mid-level management/project managers are also generally down to earth and good to work with. There are some true gems who will really get to know you as a person and work with your strengths. Mercer is working to implement a new system for staffing projects that will hopefully tone down the worst of their challenges in that area--it honestly looks like a really good system and had I stayed at the company I think I would have enjoyed the results. I know for a fact that a number of more senior consultants at Mercer (4 or more years at the company) stay because of the people. They could be making more elsewhere, but they think it's worth it to make a comfortable but not astronomical wage and stay where they are. I'll address the negative side of this in the cons section, but there is definitely something to be said for a work environment that will make you turn down an extra $50k. If you're coming in as someone with experience and are getting paid what you're worth, there are a lot of good people at Mercer and you'll likely have a much better experience than a college hire. They cater in food at the Dallas and Houston offices 3 days a week. There's also a frequently-used ping-pong table and a massage chair. The snacks are good. You have a lot of flexibility at Mercer--after your first six months on the job, you can work from anywhere, which means that if you want to visit family in another state or take a weekend trip to NYC, you can book flights from Thursday to Tuesday or something and just work from a coffee shop. Not many people can do that, and it's really an awesome perk of the job. There is job security at Mercer. They need Workday consultants, so if you get in and can do the job, you will not get fired unless you are either incredibly lazy or you do something awful. Obviously this is tied to the market for Workday, but at least in the next 4 years or so I don't see this changing. Implementation consultants have good work-life balance! Travel is not excessive, hours aren't usually that bad, and overall if you're on the implementation side everything is comfortably manageable within (sometimes slightly extended) business hours. This is super important, and very nice! Definitely an area where Mercer excels. Though to be honest, I feel like if they could be staffing you on more they probably would.
Cons
The only performance metric upper-level management cares about is utilization, but staffing is wildly inconsistent on the implementation side of the business. On the TMS side, you will be consistently overworked and underpaid. This means that if you're an implementation consultant, your effective "performance" is entirely dictated by the resource management office, not by your skills. If you're TMS, I honestly think there's better opportunity for advancement and distinguishing yourself (the head of TMS is excellent), but the work sucks, there's too much of it, and, again, you're underpaid for the amount of hours and stress you're likely putting in. If you start at Mercer right out of college, you will be paid anywhere from 15% to 50% less than a peer at a different implementation partner. After two years with excellent performance reviews and good utilization, you can expect to be paid anywhere from 15% to 50% less than a peer at a different implementation partner. When asked about getting pay up to market/median, the practice head said on a practice-wide call that she was worried about people who were getting giant raises to go to other partners because "a lot would be expected of them for that salary." Bear in mind that most of the Mercer consultants in question are highly capable Ivy League grads and that all we're talking about is getting paid a market rate. Due to the aforementioned issues (largely the pay), Mercer is experiencing rather high turnover at the moment, and that also leads to other issues with projects needing new resources in the middle, resources who haven't left being stretched thin, never knowing who's still around to ask questions of, etc. There's also a bit of an issue with quantity over quality, with consultants being staffed on more projects than they can reasonably manage well whenever there's been a glut of sales.
