Pros
Hanover's culture of kindness, trust, and flexibility sets it apart. The people, as everyone says, are amazing. The work ultimately is interesting and can be more corporate or more mission-driven depending on team. It's a great place to learn, to build a large professional network, and to try new things. If you stay and provide value, you will move up and you will get to learn skills that you may never have even known you wanted to learn. You will get more professional opportunities at Hanover more quickly. You'll ultimately take on next steps in your career that would have been a faraway pipedream without the opportunities Hanover provided. Apart from learning opportunities, the work atmosphere is friendly, generous, and extremely flexible. Analysts (as the example I am most familiar with) can choose their own hours (starting anywhere from 8-9am, no biggie if you want to come in early or later - just get your work done), receive team "incentive" days off in addition to the paid holidays, and anyone on Content in good standing who's been in seat for more than 6 months has a remote day per week. Ad-hoc remote requests are also usually granted. Hanover tries to give people a positive, flexible work environment. Benefits such as 18 base PTO days per year, paid parental leave, and solid core benefits (inexpensive health, free dental, inexpensive vision, FSAs, paid life and ad&d, SmartBenefits, etc.) demonstrate their investment in employees. They go overboard with parties, happy hours, snacks, and events. There is thorough onboarding for Content and Sales with specialized L&D/support teams focused entirely on training and talent development. They really want their staff to be happy and are willing to extend essentially every possible offering to make their people happy, except for changing the core business. I think ultimately negative reviews want them to change the core business, and in reality the framework of Hanover's environment, benefits, work product, and talent are extremely solid.
Cons
To expand on the above, I think the root causes of some critiques on here are two things: 1) Hanover grew really, really fast and has had to (or chose to) maintain some structures that some people dislike (1 project at a time, TIGHT deadlines, for most analysts) while repeatedly revamping other structures (CDs -> RDs -> CEDs). This has given some people (especially analysts) a sense that some things are negotiable while issues that affect their entry/mid-level staff like project turnaround, are not. When the project timelines cause people to burn out, they are bummed that this structure is not something that leadership is open to changing. Efforts to make products less reliant on rote work provide faster turnaround to clients but have done less to change analyst workloads. 2) Relatedly, there are a lot of people joining Hanover for their first jobs. Coming to terms with the idea that a job and an employer isn't going to be perfect and isn't their friend sucks. So does the realization that not all their feedback will be implemented. Even in cases where lots of people are giving the same feedback, good feedback. Hanover is (to quote another review) a business, and that's hard to accept when you are a bright person providing well-reasoned recommendations. They're good recommendations, but that might simply not be in alignment with how leadership wants to run the company. So some people move up to roles that fit better, some move out. Other than that: Pay can certainly be below market. And everyone says the 401k match is low, but, hey - the selection of funds is good with Principal and the 401k and match are offered immediately (30 days after hire) so it could be way worse.
