NeuStar Reviews

Current Employee – been working at NeuStar full-time for more than a year

Pros – Pay and Benefits are great

Cons – You will have no life. The management in the Finance department are so clueless. Every manager is more worried about not getting blamed for something and so ready to blame other people. Certain managers will ask you to do special projects then take all the credit. Let not talk about the billing department. None of the managers know what they are talking about and everybody in the company knows they are the worst but Finance group will always protect them. Plus it is a bunch of talk. At the last all hands meeting CFO talks about being one team being and talks about how everybody got 130% bonus. He failed to mention certain people in the Finance team only got 94% even though they came over and started the whole year as part of the Finance group. Where is the all on the same team talk now Mr CFO???

Advice to Senior Management – Fix the Finance department

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at NeuStar for more than 3 years

Pros – Benefits - The benefits package is very good.

Cons – Political - Too much emphasis on assigning blame. When things go wrong a witch hunt ensues and someone always takes the fall.

Ineffective leadership - There are managers and directors that have no business being in those positions. Most display a lack of knowledge and a lack of interpersonal and overall leadership skills. Management disarm employees--while sucking the creativity and innovativeness from the environment--making final, half-baked, decisions that almost always result in the wasteful expenditure of company funds.

Most employees in the IT division are over worked and exhausted because management has not back filled the positions left open by departing employees. The message is that there is no intention to offer relief by hiring and that everyone should fully expect to do even more than the 60 hour work weeks we were expected to perform. Employees are over worked and under appreciated.

Management is unimaginative trying to copy other companies like Google in failed attempts at appearing to be progressive. The problem here is that this is testament to how out of touch management is with the office culture, and how ineffective and unimaginative they are. They try to assimilate ideas from other office cultures rather than trying to focus on the culture unique to the company.

Management displays no confidence within their own employees. Many opportunities are routinely taken away from the employees. They turn a blind eye to the fact that the talent and skills exists right under their very nose yet will go out and spend millions outside instead of keeping things in house . Or they completely misappropriate assignments that many employees would be delighted to take on. For example, the AV (audio/visual) system in the auditorium is not built or setup properly and always experiencing technical glitches. There were employees (IT) that volunteered their talents to help plan, design, and maintain the system. Instead, they were shunned and the design decision was left into the hands of two managers--that knew nothing about AV--and an outside contractor. The result was a shabby, glitch filled, AV system, that's ineffective and plagued with technical glitches. This actually plays back into the politics because the two managers saw this as an opportunity to earn brownie points for themselves.

In all honesty, management very rarely consults with their employees on many major decisions. And these employees are supposed to be "experts" in their respective fields. If that doesn't say it all I don't know what does.

Wasteful - Without doubt this company wastes an immense amount of money on bad acquisitions, products, and internal expenditures. It is common practice to spend millions on contractors, software, hardware, and building upgrades that are unnecessary. The root of the problem exists within mid management making decisions in areas they are not qualified to and simply do not understand.

Much of this is due to egoism of the management where the daily mantra is that they know everything, never make mistakes, while their employees know nothing and are treated no better than mindless drones.

Lack of advancement opportunities - Almost zero advancement opportunities in all areas because the company almost always hire from outside instead of within. Those that do advance within are typically members of the 'good ole boy' club. The truly skilled and knowledgeable employees that work 60+ hours a week are hardly considered for advancement. Lateral moves are common, however. For a company its size there is too high of a turnover rate in some common positions. Probably due in part to lack of advancement opportunities.

Flawed review process - Neustar has a review process where a certain percentage of employees must fall within a particular performance range on paper. This is solely due to financial reasons. Even if you're an employee that works 60+ hours a week, always on call, and always going above and beyond they usually fall into the "Average" bracket. For example only 5 employees in the whole company can receive the highest mark, 10 employees can receive the second highest mark, 620 employees will receive the average mark, 5 below average, and 50 failing marks.

The rule is that if someone makes an above average grade that someone else, regardless of their work ethic, must receive a failing grade. The above average employee receives a little extra money in their annual bonus, whereas the below average employee loses money in their annual bonus. This is intentional so that the payout during bonus time is always net zero.

They do come up with clever justifications as to why someone that was always a stellar employee all of the sudden gets a failing review one year. But the real reason is because someone was graded above average and the company needed someone else to take a reduction in payout to balance it all out.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at NeuStar full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Compensation, benefits, flexibility with work/life balance.

Cons – Very political with little to no leadership. No long term vision beyond the current year or quarter. Contract mentality.

Advice to Senior Management – Take risks and eliminate the contract mentality. Focus on risk taking and engineering execution which does not exist.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at NeuStar

Pros – Easy to get a job
Lots of cash to spend
Benefits are rich
Cafe is subsidized
For the most part the executive team is invisible

Cons – Political beyond belief
An refuge camp for AOL and MCI alums
Consultants are rampant. Oliver Wyman is in Charge don't cross them.
mushroom shaped org chart. More executives than workers
A political shark tank
the entire company is betting on long shot, low probability products which suck cash

Advice to Senior Management – Show up to employee events and talk to employees. Rid yourself of the massive red tape to get most anything done

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at NeuStar

Pros – Innovation by the technical team is awesome!

Cons – No strong leadership, constant reorganization and deciding what they want to be when they grow up, lying about the status of the company, inconsistent and inaccurate information, and just plain stupidity about how to run a company and treat the people who bust their ass for the stock holders to make their money off of the blood sweat and tears of the employees.

Advice to Senior Management – Learn how to lead...not just manage....communicate....and listen to your employees.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at NeuStar

Pros – Great products with an opportunity to become a great company.

Cons – Overpriced DNS product that even management can't justify the price. Their only answer to the pricing objection is to throw 2 free months of service at the client on a "soft" contract that they count to their sales number, what a joke! Still being an employee here, I need to see a change at the top to want to stay here with the company in it's current panic mode state and looking to get rid of everybody on the bottom to justify their own jobs. The job gives you an ulcer. The management does 2 meetings a day with each other instead of being on the floor to help and assist newer reps ramping up, this is a horrible waste of time and upper management resources. The turnover rate at this company is higher than I have ever seen at another company in the Tech industry.

Advice to Senior Management – Get rid of the Director of Sales, something has to change. Definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at NeuStar

Pros – Some nice benefits, good people and a half way decent training program. The products are interesting and you will learn some new stuff.

Cons – You are pressured into working 10-12 hour days and they will measure every call, conversation, email appointment that you do. They literally examine 4 reports on sales metrics every day! This job is 100% programming and Kool-Aid, no substance. Zero strategy, networking is not allowed, there are no accounts to work (giant land grab), and management only looks at metrics. Management and their plan is a MAJOR issue here. There are many upper management types and they literally do nothing except keep the boot on the rep's throats. In 2010, 2 reps out of 70 made plan. Every year the company clears out half of their reps. You won't have a lot of time and very little opportunity to ethically make your quota. Even if you do make it, the pay is not worth the effort.

Advice to Senior Management – Stick to a plan or FIRE YOURSELF

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at NeuStar

Pros – The compensation and benefit packages are good at Neustar. The guaranteed contracts provide stability. The company is also good about allows and enabling remote work as necessary.

Cons – The downside of Neustar is a culture that is devoid of senior leadership. Executives will take credit for work of lower level people but if anything goes wrong will blame lower level employees. It is a very dsyfunctional culture with a huge amount of empire building and politics.

Advice to Senior Management – Stop the culture of top down decision making. Also, there are so many people in some areas doing nothing but creating work. In some areas of the company, a reduction in people would actually make things more efficient. There are so many layers of management that totally stifle innovation.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at NeuStar

Pros – It is a job with benefits and there is a paycheck every 2 weeks. They also have a knack for hiring great software engineers.

Cons – Not a place designed with sales professionals in mind. The negative comments about upper management from the other posts on here should state the obvious. But, aside from that......this is just not a fun place to work.

If you either have been or are looking to be a successful sales rep, you better look elsewhere. I would recommend this job to maybe someone recently out of college that has little to no sales experience and wants to grind something out for a couple of years just to put something on their resume. It is also a great environment for talentless order takers that sit and wait for sales reps to flee, thus accumulating the better accounts. I personally witnessed a lot of sales people quit while I was there.

Advice to Senior Management – You would not know what to do with it if I gave it to you.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at NeuStar

Pros – My coworkers are wonderful. Great team and supportive environment. Benefits are sufficient.

Cons – Management does not communicate or provide feedback.

Advice to Senior Management – Shift the company focus to your customers, monopolies only last so long.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend