Pros
Nice building located in central London with good facilities. Decent pay.
Cons
The company culture is good when it comes to what you can find in their written policy and how the senior management describes it, but it’s nothing like that when it comes to how they actually act. In fact, what you’ll find is a fake system which pretends to cares about diversity and inclusion, be discrimination free, encourages innovation /creativity and provides predictable and transparent communication. With regards to some of these fundamental principles of a good company culture, they don’t even bother to fake it properly. On my action of challenging some of them, authority and the fact that I don’t have the required understanding of such matters has been invoked to me. My general feeling on working at Knight Frank can be reduced to some of my experience in dealing with rental property agents, where the main goal was to make easy money by all means. If I can accept this in the rental business, I find it outrageous to see it applied in a technical environment by the upper management. In short, if you don’t like to be asked to put a smile on your face when the manager wants it, if you don’t want to be hearing lies which may affect your development path, if you don’t want to be putting a lot of effort in delivering projects which are meant to be tick box exercises for your manager and if you want to be yourself and respected for being so, then Knight Frank is not the company you are looking for. On the other hand, if you have no problem with being a yes man, if you care more about money than you care about the working environment, if you don’t have a strong technical background and no plans of improving it and if you don’t worry too much if the management layer uses your work to collect credits without recognizing your effort, then Knight Frank might be a good fit for you. The human resources are just a bad joke. How else could they be in such an environment? It is ruled by the well-known principles of defending the management layer and making sure that they say how much care is put in the so-called company culture, but, based on my experience with them, it shows as an extreme version of such approach. So, in my understanding, Knight Frank is toxic working environment which should be avoided as much as possible.
