Pros
1. Great work/life balance if you are not looking to advance your career and take home salary 2. Compensation is on par to just under par compared to industry average which I believe is fair if u are looking for 40 hr work weeks in management consulting 3. Most of senior leadership is very competitive and know what they are doing. 4. Open door policy. Most companies say it but very few actually implement it. Slalom has a hierarchical structure but otherwise has a very flat culture. 5. AMAZING Culture and consultants are good at what they do
Cons
1. Way too much investment in social activities. Agreed it promotes office culture but I feel it is detrimental in the long run cause it begins to appear like a frat type culture and seeing leadership drunk in the big events every 3 months makes Slalom look very unprofessional. Office in each region invests close to $1MM/year on such events and it makes you wonder if it makes more sense to actually give out an additional $5k in bonuses to 200 consultants (approx. # of consultants in one region) 2. Promotions are limited and if you do get promoted it's about a $5k jump in base salary so not much incentive to work harder for an additional 10 hours per week 3. Your CM’s are there to basically just approve your monthly cell phone expense and weekly timesheets. Most of them don’t have a clue of the work you are doing at the client location since the CM is in most cases on a different client 4. Due to #3 above, the performance review process is broken. The client reviews your work and the CM basically goes over the review with you w/o having a clue of what you actually work on. The CM then assigns a star rating as per his observation of the client review. To me the CM is not qualified to provide a rating if the CM is clueless of your day to day activities 5. Benefits are below average – 12 days PTO (including sick days). 401k is not competitive and health benefits are mediocre. So basically if you want to get time off during the year, DONOT get sick 6. 80% work is staff augmentation and 20% is project based. Slalom likes to believe it’s the other way around but that is definitely not the case. 7. To add to # 6 above, since most of the work is staff augmentation, it is very hard to justify rates of $150/hr at the client location. This impacts the consultant because if she is doing basic custom dev work on a project, it puts a lot of pressure on the consultant to justify such a high rate. Also consultant is reminded by the client several times that she is a very expensive resource. Have seen this in multiple clients with several Slalom resources.
