PricewaterhouseCoopers Reviews in Paris, France Area

Pros

great place to work for career focused people
good work life balance
good working conditions
energy
inspiration
leader in the financial services

Cons

salary and bonuses
frindge benefits
ability to promote new partners in the developing countries

Advice to Senior Management

perspective & challenge

Pros

the bigest firm of the big four. An international compagny. A cosmopolitan collegue. a great experience and a nice opportunity.

Cons

A very big firm. a hard work. a normal salary. big competition between some collegue. no privacy. a very hierichy

Advice to Senior Management

to improve the auditor envirement. To give additional bonus to auditor. to trust more the junior auditor. to respect the employees.

Pros

- Quite famous
- Good international network

Cons

- Friendships are more important than performing well
- No framework for the salaries
- Weak income package

Advice to Senior Management

Try to foster people willing to work and define salary range for each grade. Some junior consultants earn more than some consultants...

Pros

I chose PwC because of their Graduate Program. I think it's a great idea : I'll be able to work in 3 different departments, among which Transaction Services and in Restructuring.

Good opportunities.

Cons

Management could be more human (some examples : you scarcely see your managers / you often get staffed by e-mail or phone call / few events are organized etc.)
However, I believe that it's the same in every big company?

Advice to Senior Management

Senior staff should organize more team building events.
Senior staff should be closer to junior staff.
More incentive should be given to junior staff.

Pros

the new graduate program is a really good opportunity. You can see several department among which TS, Restructuring, M&A, Advisory etc.

Cons

Senior management should be more human. Here are some examples you get staffed by e-mail / phone call, you scarcely see your managers, there are too few team building events.

Advice to Senior Management

Senior staff should be more human and should organized more team building events.
Junior staff should be given more incentives.

Pros

- Ability to deal with great customers on real issues
- Huge network of professionals
- Career booster

Cons

- Stress all around
- Small amount of time for information sharing and capitalization
- As the population is mainly junior, management tends to consider employees as children instead of pushing them to acquire responsibilities

Advice to Senior Management

Stop considering employees as children, take more time to enhance information sharing.

Pros

many opportunities (work in a foreign country, job transfer, etc.)

Cons

salaries can be lower than competitors

Advice to Senior Management

na

Pros

PwC in general is probably one of the biggest name in the area of accounting in the World, it's great to have it on your resume, as a springboard.
In France, most of managers are concerned about your balance between life and work and recognize your involvement. Most of employees except partners are very kind to each other and general behaviour is quite good.

Cons

In France, Advisory partners are just money nerds who don't understand why they should try to keep their better employees instead of pushing them away. Money you get from your hard work is not enough compared to what they bill, and mostly compared to what concurrence can give you. Don't expect blackberry (instead they give your personnal mobile phone number to customers), food tickets and great staff days, in France every thing is kept for optimising partners benefits.
They will recognized your hard good work but will keep explain that those hard time do not allow them to give you 5% salary increase. It's like being a children at school, the imagine you have a brain but keep thinking you don't have one, that you can't make decisions on your own, that you don't have any common sense of responsability and professionnal involvment. They don't respect you from what kind of human being you are, but from kind of billing ressource you are. I'm very sad to say that, because 90% of the company really deserve to be considered better than today.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't think associates are children, stay honest with them.
Look at direct concurrence when you ask yourself why no more candidates are applying at Advisory.
Invest in the company instead of keeping everything for you, otherwise your company will stay 4th or worst in France forever.

Pros

The place is known wordwide, the place is financially secured as it belongs to a large group

Cons

PwC Advisory : Very low yearly income increases, very low bonus, weak communication from the management, unfairness in promotion and incomes (many discrepancies in the incomes in a same grade, some people from a upper grade are paid less than some people belonging to a lower grade), people are shared between IT audit and consulting projects which demotivates many people.

Advice to Senior Management

Split IT audit and Consulting services
Set official min/max income per grade
Increase recruitement criterias
Improve communication especially for difficult issues