Protiviti Reviews

Pros

-Great people and good office environment
-Good exposure to Senior Management
-Plenty of opportunities to advance career
-Generous vacation policy
-Great place to begin a career, get exposure to a number of clients, and to build good basic consulting/auditing skills

Cons

-Protiviti offers a broad spectrum of business consulting solutions, but there are very few strategic projects that actually get sold.
-The lack of strategic consulting projects results in a lack of opportunities to build a solid knowledge base in a particular area. As you progress through your career, Protivit project experiences will help you develop good basic consulting/auditing skills, but won't help you develop deep focused consulting skills.
-The compensation is below average

Advice to Senior Management

The incentive compensation plan doesn't work well with the "solutions" approach. It's hard to justify why someone would want to work on developing and selling solutions when the ICP is clearly focused on the audit and sox work (charging in a consistent 40 hours/week at a lower bill rate).

Pros

Work-life balance is probably the only truly positive side, but if you really care about your career and are not interested in boring audit or compliance project, please, DO NOT consider Protiviti.

Cons

Not a bad place to start for a college graduate but I'm sure after 1-2 years in the company the most competent people become dissatisfied from the lack of initiative from senior management to develop the business and lack of growth opportunities. Therefore, the majority of the talented people tend to leave the company, which is not surprising at all given the miserable benefits & salaries offered.

Advice to Senior Management

Invest in your people and get a realistic strategy for the future. You won't make it with the low-cost consulting firm image because it's not working.

Pros

Potential for quick promotion
Most of the people are great to work with
Very young company
If you're in the right office/group, hours are not bad

Cons

Morale is rather low
Huge disparities in the workload amongst the various offices and groups
Lack of direction from upper management
The pay is below industry norm

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to your employees...or at least pretend to

Pros

- Awesome people, intelligent and friendly
- Everyone knows everyone
- Great working environment
- Great exposure to senior management
- Very generous vacation policy

Cons

- Easy to get pigeon-holed working for the same type of projects and same clients
- Large percentage of work is SOX compliance
- Can require substantial travel
- Limited control over staffing

Advice to Senior Management

Ensure that staffing is strategic and employees' interests are taken into consideration. For less desirable projects, make sure that key staff members are rotated and have a variety of projects throughout the course of the year.

Pros

Great people, learn a lot of industries and business practices fast, excellent training programs

Cons

Consulting has a lot of travel, difficult to manage your career (ie choose industry, specialty, projects) if you are early in your career

Advice to Senior Management

To increase retention its important to manage employee preferences for specialties and project interests

Pros

Protiviti is a great work/life balance company. It doesn't pay as much as other consulting, but I don't think you work near as much either.

Cons

You will most likely be an auditor, not a consultant. Although there is promise of consulting work, it is usually reserved to a select few and the rest get SOX and auditing work.

Advice to Senior Management

Increase availability of training and transparency of consultants career goals and try to align with solutions better.

Pros

Work life balance
Great people
SOX knowledge

Cons

Not recognized by management
Compensation not competitive

Advice to Senior Management

You should really pay attention to people working for you

Pros

Great leadership
Good benefits and time off
Decent working environment
Variety of projects
Young and friendly culture on most projects involving multiple consultants

Cons

Project leadership is often stretched thin and not focused
Staffing is haphazard and you will often be switched from project to project with little or no notice at all
Frequent rebranding

Advice to Senior Management

Come up with one brand strategy and stick to it rather than constantly changing the message. Eliminate tenure based promotions.

Pros

-Competitive benefits
-Work life balance - usually never work over 45 hours a week

Cons

-Incompetent leadership
-Don't really develop technical skill sets that are transferable to your next job/career
-All or mostly internal audit/SOX work - pretty much stuck as an Internal Auditor or go back to school
-Office culture is horrible in the L.A. office; everybody is out for themselves
-No training provided
-Most people are stuck there and looking for a way out
-Upper management's treatment of employees is horrible
-Miserable working environment, only some good staff and seniors make it bearable

Advice to Senior Management

Its the responsibility of upper management to set a tone and create an environment where staffs and employees can thrive and excel. The workplace in the L.A. office provides neither. It is a very unwelcoming and uneasy place. Management does a poor job in investing time to grow and nurture their staff.

Pros

Depends on what projects you work on, the experience can be really great (fun traveling, good hours, challenging but not impossible work, great team members). There are individuals in the office that are of nurturing and supportive nature and are able to provide guidance on professional as well as personal growth.

Cons

Then there are other projects where the hours are long and you wouldn't feel as supported by the management when managers are swamped themselves with multiple demanding projects going on.

Advice to Senior Management

provide training to current employees on potential solutions/services so that people are ready to take on a variety of projects.