Poor Corporate Culture; Little Valuable Skill Development; Inadequate KPI Policy
Pros
While I have some negative feelings toward upper management and the corporate culture as a whole, the London office has great, friendly people that welcome you into the group very well. The office is located right in the center of the city, there are some snacks every week and everyone gets decent desk space and two screens. If you like the company and perform very well, there are promotion opportunities to become team leader in around a year. The base salary is above average for an entry level job without overly demanding academic requirements or a highly competitive recruitment process.
Cons
It's a glorified recruitment job - that potentially pays less than the average recruitment job when accounting for commission. 99% of your time is spent looking at Linkedin profiles, cold calling to recruit experts, sending out mass emails and scheduling consulting engagements. You will learn little if anything about strategy, consulting, project management or, well, pretty much anything except for how to look through Linkedin profiles and recruitment practices. This job will not provide you with significant transferable skills unless, of course, you want to develop a career in recruitment. The company is very results-oriented (e.g. papers with the monthly targets are posted everywhere, including above the coffee machine, in an LCD screen, in meeting rooms, etc.). Your performance determines whether you stay with the company, whether you get bonus (you need to hit minimum targets) and is the focus of the company, constantly broadcasted and emailed to everyone to shame losers and praise winners. A common issue is that performance is not entirely dependent on your skills or effort. Atheneum keeps very similar targets throughout the whole company - they vary minimally across the different teams and different offices. Offices have very different workflow and projects. There are a couple of offices that routinely get double the amount of units of the London office per associate. This is due to the quantity and nature of their projects. The workflow also varies significantly between teams in London, with certain teams consistently getting more work and better projects and, thus, outpacing the other teams. Upper management chose to ignore this variation for the most part, which generated some dissatisfaction among people from teams that cannot achieve their targets month after month. This leads to situations where you feel like you are underperforming and doing a bad job, but see no way to improve. Bad practices pervaded the company and several people were fired during my stay there with little warning given to them and no explanations given to everyone else. Payments to experts are late very often (past the 1 month payment deadline they set for themselves in the T&Cs), so you will also have to keep hearing complaints from them about not getting paid. Some of my colleagues were hired under promises of development and corporate change that never came to fruition.
