Northwestern Mutual reviews

4.0

72% would recommend to a friend

(8,253 total reviews)

Timothy J. Gerend

95% approve of CEO

73% positive business outlook

Northwestern Mutual has an employee rating of 4.0 out of 5 stars, based on 8,253 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Northwestern Mutual employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Financial Services industry (3.8 stars).

Reviews by job title

8K reviews
1.0
Mar 8, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Plenty of autonomy, free to approach things how you want.

Cons

Less of a financial planner, more of an insurance salesman. 100% of your comp is commission, and the commissions are peanuts unless you sell whole life insurance. During training you are assigned to producing a list of 200 contacts. Once training ends your job is to call, and continue calling, these people to set up a meeting. The meeting is ostensibly to get to know them and develop a plan, but the comp structure means you'll be squeezing whole life insurance into every plan (because you make pretty much $0 if you don't). Bottom line: Unless you can sell whole life insurance you will make nothing. I think I made $400 over 3 months. Maybe I just suck at selling insurance, but if you aren't confident you could sell insurance (policies with premiums of several hundred dollars a month) to at least 5-10 people stay very far away. If not, don't give this a go if you have rent to pay.

2.0
Sep 25, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

People are nice Company has good reputation Extremely flexible work schedule/work life balance as you own your business, but don’t let this flexibility prevent you from putting in the work (probably should put in 50 hrs/week when getting started)

Cons

Expectation is to do “joint work,” but during hiring process they didn’t tell me that you share your commissions 50/50 with the senior reps you get partnered with; this basically amounts to these senior reps getting free referrals (and eventually clients when the vast majority of new reps fail within first year); was a major focused message at this year’s Annual Meeting Whatever they say you’ll need to produce to succeed, multiply by at least 2 times because of the commission sharing and typical lower premium per policy newer reps experience compared to the more tenured reps. Your only way to earn any meaningful money in your first years is selling insurance, no matter what they will try and tell you. You better have an enormous network of friends, family, acquaintances, or community members or you WILL not succeed. If you are not comfortable prospecting and asking for referrals until you are blue in the face, you will struggle. Despite NM claiming to be a planning focused firm, which they really do try to do a good job at, everything at NM begins and ends with a lot of pressure to sell permanent life insurance (PLI). You will not survive/make any money here unless you sell the dickens out of PLI, especially in your first few years! You will get next to ZERO training on using their proprietary financial planning software (which is pretty darn complicated to use!) or their investment offerings. I figure there is no training in these areas because if you can’t sell life insurance, you’ll be gone in short order anyway. Maybe there train you more if you make it a few years. For self-employed investment professionals, starting grid payouts (35% of GDC) for investment production are low. Ability to advance up the grid is tied to your insurance premium production too. You climb payout faster if your premium productions is good, slower if it isn’t. They were not transparent at all during the hiring process about the details surrounding your expenses, revenue/pay, and ongoing expectations for you to hire employees to build out your support team. IF you survive the first year, be prepared to start increasing your expenses by hiring support staff and footing the bill for a bunch of office related expenses, such as general shared supplies, copying expenses, and office food/water service to name a few, with more starting in year 3 like renting your office space, paying for your company issued computer, paying for NM support staff if you didn’t hire your own yet and more.

1.0
Feb 1, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Name recognition, good parking, some nice people in the office

Cons

Zero guidance. You are berated into saying you care about producing so that the office and director can make overhead but no one shows up for you, the new rep. Lots of talk about family culture and team and it's a whole lot of love bombing but none of it is actually real. They got rid of some of the most dedicated helpful people there and then it gets all "we don't talk about Bruno" when their pictures are taken off the wall. You will do joint work with people just barely a few months into the business because there's no one else to help. It is very cliquey. Once you are on the outs (and there's really no telling what is going to put someone on the outs versus someone else because it definitely isn't about performance) you get ignored and no one wants to help you anymore. It's disorganized and overall the vibe is terrible if you look beyond the forced camaraderie. I can't get assistance with the things I need to service my clients. No one is ever prepared for meetings and you look like a fool when you bring your friends and family to the table to do planning. The regular training involves listening to the director go on and on about the latest podcast she listened to and rehashing what it was like at her old office in her glory days. Be prepared for group texts at all hours of the night with inspirational live laugh love memes and a lot of ridiculous challenges and contests no one cares about. You do not get paid your commissions when you should and heaven forbid you ask why. There is never a good reason. You get sold on flexibility and freedom but if you work from home you get lectured. But then you come in for meetings and they get canceled with zero notice. It all feels very silly and so unprofessional.

Viewing 124 - 126 of 8,253 Reviews

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