Bain & Company Reviews

Current Employee – been working at Bain & Company

Pros – Learning opportunities, down-to-earth co-workers, culture, ability to shape your own professional development, externship and transfer opportunities. Results oriented focus adds to the value and fun of the job. Global training and Bain World Cup are some of the best experiences I have ever had.

Cons – Compensation and benefits may not be as good as competitors. Lifestyle varies widely from case to case. Type of work is dependent on the office you are located in.

Advice to Senior Management – Senior management has done a great job maintaining the Bain culture while still growing the company at an incredible rate.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Bain & Company

Pros – The Brand name is very strong...much stronger than banks like JP Morgan, Lehman, Bear Stearns, or UBS.....

Below prestige of Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley. Proportionately, we probably get more people into Harvard and Stanford B-School though.

Cons – The compensation is too low, and there is not enough variation to separate the great employees from the good ones.

There is also sometimes an awful lot of the consulting BS.....we often will try to make an estimate on top of an estimate on top of an estimate until our answer is either so watered down it doesn't help, or just really off.

Advice to Senior Management – Pay your people more.

Don't believe you know how to run a client's business better than they know how to run it on day one of the case.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Bain & Company

Pros – The people and pedigree. People at Bain are very intelligent and fun. The name on the resume will also take you far in recruiting for your next job.

Cons – The compensation. Out of college, most people who get job offers at Bain also get offers at top-tier investment banks as analysts. The exit opps out of both of these places is near identical. The downside of Bain is lower compensation in terms of bonus (particularly in an up-market); but the trade-off is the work at Bain is far more intellectually stimulating and I would argue you're better suited for business in your next job.

Caveat: If you factor in their b-school package over the number of years, the compensation actually is the same as a banking base + bonus over the years. Not everyone wants to goto b-school right away, though.

Advice to Senior Management – None.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Bain & Company

Pros – Bain has a strong and prestigious name which opens doors to virtually anything you may want to do in the future. Bainies are smart and fun to work with and are 'at-cause' in identifying with the client's most burning issues.

Cons – For a global consulting firm, it is very regionalized and offers limited opportunities for a global experience. While there is global training and some transfer opportunities, overall there aren't man instances where case teams can work outside their home office.

Advice to Senior Management – Become more global

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Bain & Company

Pros – Helpful people, challenging work environment, creative and fun work

Cons – be ready to put in long hours at work, although they say that you will have a good work life balance, thats not true!! we usually put in 60 hours/week and more.

Advice to Senior Management – People in france work 30 hours/week, and it is pretty well known they are more productive than most in the US. Please, tone down the work hours, open more offices or assign people to work with clients in the same place, and let employees work from home at least 2 days a week.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Bain & Company

Pros – (from an associate consultant perspective)
-great professional development opportunities, you will definitely be pushed and challenged
-steep learning curve, you won't have time to get too bored of any topic or industry
-exposure to a variety of industries and business problems
-plenty of opportunities to develop close relationships with colleagues

Cons – (still from an associate consultant perspective)
-has gotten more hierarchical over the past few years
-culture has disintegrated, not a place to go if you're looking for the "fratty" culture
-lack of control over what cases you get staffed to
-lots of variability around which consultants, managers, and partners you get staffed with -- some you may end up getting along with great, and others may be awful to work with

Advice to Senior Management – -senior management should lead in guiding/improving company culture

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Bain & Company

Pros – (In no particular order)
1. Prestige/Brand: Bain has a brand name that is tough to beat. It's a real advantage for MBA applications as well as other career opportunities to have Bain on your resume.
2. Networking: If you are looking for access to well-networked VP's in the business world, you will find them at Bain. Keeping in contact with current and former Bainees is easy to do and frequently a means to future opportunities. Once you've worked at Bain, getting an "industry" job (rather than consulting for the industries) is a pretty easy goal, since all of Bain's clients need smart, business-minded employees, and Bain is very good about "match-making" in that sense.
3. Education: Bain provides a great understanding of how the corporate world operates (e.g., challenges faced, internal politics of clients, supply/demand challenges). From the nitty-gritty (using excel spreadsheets and statistical tools, etc.) to the highest level (understanding growth strategies and developing client skills), Bain will educate you very, very well.
4. People: The difference between Bain and the other "big-name" Management Consulting firms is the people. Bain is far and away the most "fun" place to work, despite it being just as challenging and lucrative a job. If deciding between Bain, BCG, and McKinsey, know that the clients are the same caliber (McKinsey tried to convince me otherwise, and they were false), but the people you spend all of your time with are the consultants themselves, so choose the people you feel are the closest match to your own personality. The reputations that guide most people correctly are as follows: Bain is for fun/social types who like to work hard and play hard, BCG is for intellectual types who are comfortable in their more "nerdy" personalities, and McKinsey is for the most cut-throat types who tend to have egos and who don't mind the overly-political environment & staffing decisions.

Cons – As with all consulting firms, the quality of your experience is largely dependent on the type of cases to which you are assigned, and, even more so, on the people with whom you are working. Certain Case Team Leaders (CTL's) and Managers are devoted to developing well-trained Associate Consultants (AC's), while others are more focused on their own reputations. The worst case scenario is having inconsistent/short-lived reporting relationships and/or supervisors who are not invested in professional development. Having had both, and having seen peers with the opposite, I can attest to the difference it makes in one's ability to advance within Bain as well as one's quality of experience. The fact that an AC's assignments and roles are determined by fairly arbitrary/random decisions by the Staffing Dept makes this downside especially frustrating, as there is nothing an AC can do to impact whether he/she get's lucky or falls through the proverbial cracks. At the end of the day, even "bad" experience at Bain is considered good experience by other employers, but it can be frustrating to be in a competitive environment and feel "neglected" by your superiors, particularly when those individuals are determining your eligibility for promotions and write your recommendations.

Advice to Senior Management – 1. Senior Management should look at promotions differently. Instead of looking for top-performers in the current position and offering better positions to those individuals, they should look for high-performers who seem to have the best skill set for the NEXT LEVEL position. Different positions require different skill sets, and too frequently Senior Management promotes data-gurus out of the data-intense positions into people-managing roles, and very often those data-gurus do not make the best managers.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Bain & Company

Pros – Working with Bain & Company is a terrific way to start your career, because it opens so many doors, both into other professional fields as well as t business schools. If you are interested in working in Private Equity or general management down the road, management consulting is an ideal path to take. Within management consulting firms, Bain & Company is among the preeminant firms. It also provides a unique experience from competitors such as McKinsey & Co or The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) as Bain tends to hire more young associate consultants. That gives the junior employees a network to work with and to spend time with out of work, while still giving them the top notch work experience.

Cons – Several downsides are that salaries are flat across regions and the hours and travel can be brutal. Wherever one works in te country, salaries and benefits are equal, which means that, financially speaking, locations with the lowest cost of living, like Atlanta or Dallas, make a lot more sense than high cost places, like New York or Boston. They tell you to expect to work around 60 hours a week, which is generally accurate but there are several notable exceptions that can be pretty brutal (a friend of mine was sent to a foreign country for a week, and ended up there for 6 months, and had to quit to be able to come home).

Advice to Senior Management – Given my experience, I would say that senior management is not in touch enough with the needs of the individual workers. Performance reviews were irregular, spotty, and not helpful at all. In some cases they were even blatently misleading, which produces a sense of insecurity for those who must rely on the performance review to read the enigmatic management's mind.