Pros
- Pretty lax expense policy. $25 for dinner - Super smart junior team - Dressed-down culture. pretty casual most days - Get to work with some F100 clients
Cons
Where do I even begin? First, let me say that I'm not someone who really writes reviews. But after seeing all of these positive (most likely fakes planted by senior management) posts flooding glassdoor lately, I feel like it's my duty to provide a different perspective to any potential employees or clients. - The CEO is a megalomaniac. The partners are mostly incompetent. That's because they aren't really consultants to begin with. Their hands-off approach is due to their ineptitude and laziness. They are very good at hiring people and selling business. They just don't think they have any actual obligation to support their team. They just expect junior staff to grind and figure out a way to get work done. - There is zero training. Once again, this is due to a disinterested senior management who (up until recently), has had no one to supervise them. Very basic frameworks and analyses that we pride ourselves on being experts on are things that are not common knowledge among employees. How can an 'apprenticeship' model work if everybody keeps quitting? No one is around long enough to teach new hires. - Clients do not respect us. Because Vermeer does work for very little money AND because the work is frequently shoddy, clients disrespect us regularly. Can't tell you the number of times we have sent clients presentations where the numbers have only been reviewed by an analyst -an analyst that has had no training. Whoops. - People can get nasty. I love the junior team, but sometimes Vermeer brings the out the worst in people. You are encouraged to backstab, lie, pretend to know things you don't, pretend that you don't notice things that are glaringly wrong. This place has asked me to compromise my morals more than once. I do not like lying to clients. I do not want to bad mouth my peers or clients. I do not want to over-promise and under-deliver under highly stressful timelines. It's ridiculous. People are pushed to their brink here. The company is losing people left and right. And because the business is on a downturn right now, they can't even afford to hire more people. This means fewer people to actually do work, at a business that is desperate for more revenue. That's a pretty bad combination. As far as I know, all of the junior people (myself included) are frantically looking for other jobs so we can get out of here asap. Its bad right now, but it can definitely get even worse. Now that Vermeer is under scrutiny by Kantar because of the new re-org, its possible that things will change. But that's hopeful. Realistically, it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better (if it ever gets better). On the bright side, everybody who leaves Vermeer is really happy they left, and ex-employees usually go on to work for pretty cool companies (including competitor consulting firms). That shows how talented the junior staff is at Vermeer. In sum: this place is a disaster. It's a textbook example of how a company should NOT operate. For anyone potentially interested in Vermeer: do yourself a favor and look elsewhere. You'll probably get paid more, learn more, and actually be respected, and not have to run around every day like the sky is falling.
