Guidehouse Senior Associate reviews

Terrible Work Life Balance and Metrics. Guidehouse carried over these bad employee practices from PwC. Hours Over Standard (or your 2nd Full Time Job) metric: The excessive hours you are required to work on proposals, volunteering, and one internal initiative after the other – in addition to fulltime client delivery work. Jumping through these required hoops will not guarantee that you make an ‘Impact’, as Impact is a subjective and moving target. Needless to say, they say jump and you say how high. You better be keeping up with client demands too – there will be no balancing of the ‘internal Asks’ against your client delivery and billability demands which will naturally suffer. At annual assessment time you will be measured up against your colleagues on number of billable hours, Hours Over Standard, Impact (that moving and subjective target), and of course who favors you. No one cares that you spent nights and weekends away from your loved ones to jump through their endless hoops and that you actually delivered quality to your client. Utilization metric: Client billable hours. There is constant pressure to meet and exceed this metric. You will bear the brunt of the inherit risk in contracting (delays in staffing, contract issues, etc.) that can stand in the way of meeting this metric and beating out the next guy’s utilization metric at assessment time. All those required hours you had to spend meeting the deadlines of non-billable internal projects don’t mean a thing – because now your client utilization hours are not up to snuff. Imagine having to make up time/billable hours because you were required to work on intense internal deadlines that took you away from your client work, insult to injury. Awful.

- Business appears to operate w/ same mentality of PwC brand, but with a Guidehouse brand that has no brand equity - Milestone rewards for Senior, Manager promotions were effectively removed - Compensation for existing employees materially disparate from market value - Disconnect between what senior mgmt. discusses during all-hands meetings vs. reality of the business - No campus recruiting presence, heavy reliance on headhunter orgs and referrals - Brand new / buggy IT systems create burden when delivering on client work - Unclear communication of Guidehouse business processes that changed as a result of spin-out - Aptitude of new hires is below that of talent recruited w/ PwC - No performance review system -- we create career goals for the year, but no mechanisms implemented to enable period or real-time feedback of my actual day-to-day work - No in-house trainings available - New initiatives at the firm show promise, but everyone is overwhelmed with oversubscription to client work - Folks who were with PwC and endured the transition --- many are leaving