McGladrey Reviews in Chicago, IL Area

Pros

There are many great employees who work at McGladrey. Peers are very cooperative and helpful in completing assignments.

Cons

Longer hours are sometimes expected, often without advance notice. "Work-life" balance does not happen for all employees. Employee ratings based mostly upon popularity.

Advice to Senior Management

Make employee evaluations based upon performance. This would be advantageous in retaining the highest quality employees at McGladrey. Some do not see this currently happening.

Pros

Good experience with complex transactions
Good client base

Cons

Employees are frequently told by superiors that they are stupid if they aren't able to self teach complex tasks
This sums up how people are generally treated:
Highly ranked senior whose father died suddenly and unexpectedly during busy season and wanted one day off for the funeral was told "I guess you can take the day off but you're going to have to work twice as hard the rest of the days this week"
Highly ranked senior asked for help getting their schedule under control after working many 85+hour work weeks from their career advisor was told "if you can't take the heat get out of the kitchen"

They have never promoted anyone to the manager level that was not hired directly out of school.

80+ hour work weeks in busy season and 50 hour weeks the rest of the year

Management doesn't care about people, even the very best and brightest people, just how billable and profitable they are.

Pros

very good about balancing work and outside life

Cons

too much work for one individual....expectations too high to be achieved.

Pros

flexible schedule, close to train

Cons

no fairness. people started career with McGladrey always get the longer stick, faster promotion, purposely inflated rating.

Advice to Senior Management

Be fair.

Pros

Competitive pay and benefits; career advancement if you are lucky enough to work in a growing sector. Good holiday and end of season party. Partners/managing directors have an open door policy and in general can be easily approached. Pretty fair evaluation system.

Cons

There are too many office politics and games - just doing a great job will not get you anywhere. The company is confused about what culture it wants to have. The pay is decent, but too many hours are expected for the pay. Other than the CPA, the company does not encourage employees to seek out other designations. The company has a small town feel which appeals to some, but it needs to do a better job of hiring and promoting minorities (i.e. African American, Latinos, Asian, Jews). The company uses a variety of sneaky tactics to monitor employee's activity and ultimately get rid of employees they no longer want to keep. Unfortunately, it is not a comfortable environment to work in.

Advice to Senior Management

Clarity and straight talking with employees is what is needed. Pay attention to the nature of employees' complaints and concerns.

Pros

Good pay, great opportunities to learn. Lots of specialty groups with a lot of knowledge. If you come here out of college, there is good opportunity for advancement.

Cons

Mickey G's promotes "work life balance" to attract talent - this is hogwash. Sure there is work life balance, but the scale is always balanced towards work. People leave, never get replaced and the workload just increases for those who stay. The culture here has really hit the crapper.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't pump up work life balance when you don't mean it.

Pros

Good benefits and a challenging environment for consulting. The option to work at home when not on an engagement is a plus.

Cons

No work life balance what so ever. Constant change in structure and senior management. Poor communication of expectations. Poor annual raises and bonuses which is blamed on economy even though business had been well.

Advice to Senior Management

Management should compensate and promote women fairly. Men make more money in the same positions than women who work just as hard if not harder.

Pros

The company offers good training, plenty of CPE, experience, ability to specialize in a single field, and the ability to choose audit or taxation.

Cons

70-80 hrs busy season, 60-65 off-season. Evaluating system = partners rate every member of the department from low to high, all levels. Top ones raise, bottom ones out.

Advice to Senior Management

Company needs to reward the sectors that require more work and reward them financially. I never heard the phrase "6 days, 60 hours" until my exit interview. It was 7 days, 4 months straight. I would have love to have stayed, but it wore me down.

Pros

I would say that the best reason to work for McGladrey & Pullen is to create a stepping stone for your career. It is a great place to gain some of the necessary experience needed in the accounting field. The variety of projects that you will work on will give you a solid base for the next level.

Cons

The biggest con working for McGladrey & Pullen is the deception from management. It seems, at least to me, that they will lie in order to keep your moral up. I don’t know if this is the best managing technique but it does eventually catch up to them while they see valued employees leave the front door.

Advice to Senior Management

Other than the aforementioned, I didn’t have too much interaction with senior management. I tried to stay away from them as much as possible because I knew that all I would get from them is the runaround or a lie.

Pros

At the Chicago office audit practice you get to have a lot of independence in your work. For many smaller clients you will be in charge of the audit within 2 years of starting. The office environment is fairly casual. All the managers and partners have their doors open. In the financial services group, you get to build relationships with the clients' executive management almost from the time you start. Generally if you put in the work, you will learn a lot very quickly. The starting salary is definitely in line with the big 4 in Chicago. At least it was a few years ago. I recommend researching the different groups in the firm, they all run differently because the partners running them pretty much do whatever they want.

Cons

Seems like the place is very disorganized. Although I hear this is the case at many firms, I still didn't like hearing "look at last years files" when I asked about how to do something. Pretty much I learned how to do everything by looking at last years files. Mentoring was almost non existent. Depending on the type of person you are the following may be a downside. In my case it was. The majority of the people at the 1S Chicago office are from small-town-USA and it shows. So if you are used to city people and interests beyond work, sports, and drinking beer, it's sometimes hard to relate to people beyond the work day.

Advice to Senior Management

Senior management should try to actually create a stronger more uniform company culture. Most importantly, some of the groups need to seriously reconsider the way they schedule staff. It is very disorganized. I'm not sure if this was a problem on the legacy McGladrey side of the firm, but it definitely is on the legacy Amex TBS side.