Société Générale Reviews in Paris, France Area

Pros

You can enjoy the mutual respect and quite good team support.
Socété Générale has a fairly good training system which allows new recruited to take responsabilities.
Société Générale offers a lot of training programs.
The internal mobility is available.

Cons

The company has a very detailed segmentation. You have to concentrate on a small piece of job.
Even though SG adopted an international expanding strategy by recruting a lot of foreign origin employees, but it offers only a small chance of promotion to these people.

Advice to Senior Management

The company should adopt a more decentralized organisation and decrease the hierachiral layers inside the organisation. It would be nice that the senior managers have a more closed and intimate relationship with their subordinates.

Pros

business development, innovation and people

Cons

bureaucraty, IT management not in line with business needs

Advice to Senior Management

rely more on people and let them do their job by reducing bureaucraty

Pros

in Paris, management is in paris

Cons

very political instead of business. management unaware about business, more Club Med connections

Pros

The place to be for derivatives pro. Good start for interns in trading, teams share the experience with interns if they like you.

Cons

From the begging you understand that there is no way or you have to be very lucky to be employed at the end of your internship, as a result, not easy everyday to find the desire to give best of you.

Advice to Senior Management

To be less french. Mean that the interns are not just a less expensive headcount, but potentialy a new employee.Concerning me i would never back within the french bank.

Pros

Smart people, brings innovation in capital markets, entrepreneurship spirit

Cons

difficult to get promoted if you are not part of the serail of top Engineering schools

Advice to Senior Management

Be careful not too overweight immediate profitability

Pros

Good place to start with. When starting low, good opportunities to move up.
Very well balanced between personal life and work . 5 years is a max in this bank

Cons

Situation getting worse since 2008.
Top Management completely short-minded, trying to get employees believing everything's fine.
A mexican army of employees, most of which are powerpoint pros.
Too much people to work on a single simple case, that makes the 1000 emails threshold a minimum
SG becoming a low-tier bank while few years ago the name was respected in the industry.
Completely risk adverse in all and every fields of the bank won't help get the situation better

Advice to Senior Management

open your eyes and ears. Come back to more normal way of doing business, accept failures and move forward.
Do not seek the zero-risk situation or shareholders and employees won't last long.

Pros

SG is a big company where oportuinites are many. Possibility of moving to another branch are numerous (for the undecided/adventurous).

Cons

However, at the middle office level at least, it seems that promotions are not so frequent. Not fitting the french "cadre" of a typical employer (usually coming from "grandes ecoles")

Advice to Senior Management

Senior management is respetcful althoug very quite unpresnet (huge strucutre and builing at la defense)