Pros
Great office location. Got some good resume-building skills, including everyday contact with high-level executives inside and outside the organization. Higher management is aware of many of the problems within the company, which I genuinely think is a pro. I had an amazing direct supervisor.
Cons
Outside of my direct supervisor, my experience with management involved an intolerably high level of micromanagement. My perception was that 1. everyone at the company felt that the industry and the organization was so specialized, complex, and unique that it required years to fully understand and implement correctly, meaning that 2. no one trusted me to really do my job because I didn't have five years of tenure with the company. My experience was that there was a sharp divide between the associates/senior associates/non-management (usually young women in their 20s) and managers/senior managers/high levels of the company (more men the higher you move up the chain). The younger, lower-level workers were not trusted. Because of this trust divide, it was exceedingly difficult for me to care about my job after six months working there. A perfect example of how my morale was degraded over time was the oversight I received on day-to-day tasks. I'm no stranger to working in marketing -- I know reviews and approvals are necessary in any marketing position. However, my experience at SmithBucklin was that the review processed crossed a line from "making sure everyone with skin in the game is properly informed" to "we're pretty sure you don't know what you're doing, so just sit there until we tell you otherwise." More than once, after working there for 4+ months, I was asked to send a draft email to another department member (not my supervisor) to review before sending. Because younger employees were not trusted to handle even simple tasks, I never had enough to do, and neither did anyone at my level within my department; meanwhile, our supervisors and management were constantly overwhelmed and putting in overtime. Another consequence of the trust divide was that employees who had been at the company for 10 years or longer, but had serious problems (incompetence, borderline harassing behavior, poor people managers, etc.), were never disciplined or fired. Within my department, there was an attitude of "this is how this person is; if you don't like it leave, and it's not like anywhere else will be better." That was the implicit and explicit message I received when I pushed back against these problems. As stated above, the company is aware that there are culture problems; the turnover rate alone is a red flag. However, at least within my department, many of the proposed solutions didn't make sense for the kind of organization SmithBucklin is. Some example companies we did research on in order to emulate were Google and Amazon. I found this curious, as SmithBucklin is not and will never be that kind of company; its very mission (to serve the missions of nonprofit client organizations) is antithetical to the missions of Amazon, Google, and other large, publicly-held companies. I'm also trying to be very careful in how I word this review, because I know for a fact the corporate marketing team does its level best to remove any and all negative reviews. I was also asked multiple times while working there to leave a review on Glassdoor, if I did in fact enjoy working there.
