Slalom reviews

Over the course of 4 odd years, they have established a homogenous leadership group and continue to promote individuals to higher ranks based mostly on those qualities. After working under management across various projects, you come to find that these "leaders" have very poor management skills and are not experts in their respective industries. You also find senior consultants acting as project managers who really struggle to manage a team and produce quality deliverables. As other reviewers have mentioned, many employees come from the same local consulting firm as the the person running the office. The head of the office, who initially comes across as very caring and involved during the interview process, is really quite cold and plays extreme favoritism. Top management enthusiastically speak at office events but lack the decency to even try to familiarize themselves with all employees. You see certain teams put on a pedestal whereas some are not even given a shred of importance, and this is all based on the $$$ they are bringing to the company. Slalom dc is not as different from other consulting firms as it claims to be. The work done has low impact/value to customers as projects are too short to even make much of a difference; But there is a high learning curve for employees. The combination of these leads to stressful and often meaningless projects.

Slalom prioritizes hiring from big consultancies, in particular Accenture and Deloitte. Two effects of this are that they frequently hire for that culture fit vs. competence; and there are a lot of fair-to-middling Big-X consultants that get managed out of those firms that land at Slalom. A lot of the work is staff augmentation, non-strategic. Getting people billable takes precedent over meaningful work. Senior leadership is overwhelmingly from Accenture/Deloitte/EY etc., so if you are not from one of those firms you will most likely cap out if you want a career vs. a job. Slalom preaches diversity and inclusion from a background perspective, but currently their diversity initiatives are "for Women." Most Slalom leaders expect you to buy into the Slalom Kool-Aid, so if you are looking for cool work but not a religious experience, your career path will be hindered. Over the last 24 months, it felt like priority had shifted away from being the best consulting firm in the world to a quest to expand internationally and hit $1B in revenue, and if things have to be sacrificed to get there, so be it. Oh - and benefits are far below industry average. 7 holidays, and 2 weeks leave which is inclusive of sick, vacation, whatever you need it for. Recruiting will dazzle you with alternative models and funny math. It often feels like you are working for a cheap accountant (for example, new consultants often get recycled laptops that are years into their depreciation cycle). In summary - if you are an ex-Big X consultant that doesn't want to travel, it's a great place. If you are from a niche tech firm, industry, etc., you will most likely find it very hard to advance beyond jr. leadership.