Pros
1. Business idea is brilliant. 2. Day-to-day exposure to various terms, concepts and companies from different industries. 3. Compliance, which many feel painful in project execution but is fundamentally crucial to the business and its culture. It sets a high standard of business ethics, which advocates “learn/share in a right way” and stands out from other despicable players. 4. Logo design and branding style is not bad.
Cons
Regional Cons (Asia): 1. Full of office politics across Asia/China. Heads/captains only care about territory, headcounts and promotions. They are more interested in gaining internal resouces and powers, rather than winning back market shares, which is top down from region to country consistently. You will need to pick your side and show loyalty, and there is no cross-team/cross-office collaboration. E.g., Beijing and Shanghai are totally different kindoms and people don’t greet with each other. 2. Performance measurement mechanism is not functional. It is neither scientific nor fair, and is advocating short-sighted behaviors that gradually damages good qualities that real professionals should have. Such mechanism has eliminated many smart people with passions. The true skills you need for promotion here are ass-kissing and “work smart”. 3. Management team is either Hong Kong or foreign, who have no clue how to win in local market. They like bragging about their “initiatives” but none of them works out. Competitors are taking more and more market shares and some ex-GLGers choose to start their own business in same market. The decision making process is in black box. Lack of public communication and transparency leads to no ones knows what’s going on or what others are busy with. 4. Very high employee turnover rate, maybe the highest region across globe. If your tenure is more than 12 months, congrats you are an experienced. Employees with questionable integrity are made as role model and get more promotions and better packages. Amateur level HR function, and always busy with hiring/firing. No talent growth or retention efforts. No employee feedback survey. Tenure longer than 3 years is very very rare. Separation Agreement is very frequently used, and few formers have a happy farewell with GLG. You are highly suggested to reach out to those recent formers on Linkedin to do due dilligence before making any decision. Global Cons: 1. Teams like Tech and finance play much more important roles than the business team. They often ignore practical pain points in project execution and choose to develop those fancy but unmature functions like AI bots. 2. There is no respect to experts, though GLG claims it’s running the largest expert community. The company is not interested in putting efforts in management/maintenance of its expert (Council Member) group, which is not considered as core asset. The experience created for experts is very poor and rude, so you can barely build any deep connection with them. Accordingly, GLG doesn’t respect expert related functions as well. Hence the career suggestion is, if you can choose to do client facing role then and don’t choose recruiting roles. They are less invested and often treated as a less-valuable function. Best thing is, if a client facing role is challenged for failure in delivering the required expert, you don’t need to take blame and can always say “it’s because our recruiting team failed to find expert”. 3. Poor talent strategy is globally consistent. Employees are more like spare parts to the company. No growth plan, and only on-board training is available. It’s either because talent is truly less important to business, or HR is only functional at hiring/firing.