Church & Dwight reviews

The mantra at C&D (and you will hear this until your ears bleed) is "We run lean!" Great, but this philosophy is applied across the board without nuance. New employees are often lured in with the promise that they will be able to work on new initiatives and special projects, only to discover 80% of their time is spent putting out fires. Relations between corporate and production plants, while improved, are still less than ideal. The company has mostly grown through acquisitions. While the policy is that they acquire "the product and the formulas" but rarely the facilities or the personnel, the new products will be loaded onto the work loads of existing employees, at least temporarily. There is a lot of mission creep. If an employee leaves/retires/is fired their duties are generally reassigned to an existing employee "temporarily". Except the situation is never reviewed; you'll do those duties until you yourself leave. In recent years, lower level clerical employees have been eliminated through attrition; higher level, more senior employees end up performing clerical functions. Very inefficient and short-sighted. C&D tends to "cheap out" on technology. The less expensive option consistently will be chosen, only for it to prove inadequate and time/money wasted a few years later to replace/upgrade. While recent years have seen a huge cleanup of job titles and salary bands, salaries tend to be based on competing consumer goods companies nationwide rather than geographically close competitors (which are mainly Pharmaceutical companies that pay more). Benefits are adequate but I'm told they compare poorly to the pharmaceuticals. If you are lower than Director level, you are basically disposable (sooner or later this will be made clear). This is probably true of a lot of employers but seemed particularly stark at C&D. Internal promotions are relatively rare; outside candidates are consistently seen as superior. Training is inconsistent. Yearly employee review process is convoluted , time consuming and of dubious value.

We are hiring new people which takes time so we are doing a lot with fewer people. And with the recent commodity pressures which didn’t exist in recent yers and which we have little to no control over we are being looked at differently, which is unfair.