Creating Brands Consumers Love ...and HR Policies Technical Employees Hate
Pros
P&G has a strong corporate culture. There is a solid commitment to company values, consumers, and -to some extent - the environment. Good people management skills are valued, broad and thorough training is encouraged, and they really work to keep you here for a lifetime career. Job switching is allowed or even encouraged, and most people work on an assignment for 2-3 years before moving on to new functions or brands. This creates broad skillsets and an openness to other points of view.
Cons
P&G's hiring practices are focused on "leadership", which might sound good on paper but has the unfortunate side effect of creating an organization filled with strong opinions and not enough people willing/able to carry out all the day-to-day grunt work involved in creating personal care products. Additionally, since P&G hires for life but has a fairly flat organization structure, you can expect only 1-2 promotions in your entire career. By hiring very talented people, there is a deep backlog of qualified people all vying for few roles - our promotional track is constipated with ambitious and frustrated people. On another note, P&G has 2 hiring tracks: management, and the administrative & technical (A&T) function. There are 3 pay/promotion levels between being hired as an A&T and as a manager - but both tracks often come in with a bachelors degree. Engineers are managers, scientists are lab assistants. If you have a Chemistry or Biology background without a PhD you will start far below the curve and will need to carefully consider whether working here is worth the extra 8-10 years it will take to get to the level other degrees are hired in at. There are also marked differences in the promotion timing across job functions. Marketing, Market research (CMK), Purchasing, Sales and several other commercial functions promote much more quickly than the R&D and manufacturing jobs. The pay tends to reflect a similar bias, in part because higher job titles command additional income. Like many companies, P&G does annual ratings on a 3 point scale, broken out 20% 1 rated, 75% 2-rated, 5% 3-rated, with the lowest 5% being put on a probationary improvement plan. The unfortunate piece of this type of rating system in such a large company is that the exact same performance level year to year could conceivably get you a 1-rating in a slow year and a 3-rating in a particularly good year. More often the problem is that you've delivered a $10MM project and someone else has delivered a $15MM project, so you are rated with the middle of the pack. And finally, the usual bureaucratic trip-ups of working for a massive multi-national corporation. Everything takes longer than it ought to, and with extra paperwork. :-)
