Cornerstone Research Reviews

Pros

Investment in people - good development opportunities, interesting work, leaders who care about whether people enjoy their work and experience. I can tell the leaders are trying to make this a great place to have a career because of investment in hiring and spending. Can manage work-life balance if you decide to do it - have to make it happen for yourself and try to get on cases with managers who leave you alone. Lots of things are changing for the better. It's a great place and the good things are lost because of small problems it would be easy to fix. We make good money. I know officers make a lot of money, which is great, and they get to manage their work-life balance much better than anyone else.

Advice to Management

Make sure you know what is going on in the company - don't guess because you have talk to one or two squeaky wheel people - those people are not the ones who are going to stay here anyway. I want to stay and I get less attention because I do not complain. Let people figure out what they want to do and go do it without getting 10 layers of approval. Help people get good case roles - backlog process is great in my office now but my peers in some office do not have the good luck or anyone to talk to about it. Figure out who wants to be here and get rid of anyone, even senior people, who are bringing us down because they don't like it here and do not do anything to help, they just complain. They do not even know that they ARE the problem. A lot of us want to do good things, but it is too hard to get permission and we are not motivated because of the whiners.

Pros

Great culture
Incredibly intelligent, humble coworkers

Advice to Management

make sure the growth is managed such that analyst culture is preserved

Pros

-Great pay and benefits
-Depending on your advocates, opportunities for growth and progression
-Mid-size allows for lots of room to interact with individuals at all levels
-Financially stable organization that rewards hard work

Advice to Management

-You have smart people here who want to help the company grow...listen to them; you're not always the smartest people in the room.
-You've hired very smart opertaions staff in recent years and they know what they are doing, so let them do what they know how to do. Again you're not always the smartest people in the room.

Pros

An excellent firm to work for with a friendly atmosphere, commitment to its employees and quality of work.

Pros

*Great compensation and benefits
*Opportunity to work with smart, fun, dedicated teams
*Interesting work
*Senior people are very engaged and approachable
*Lots of room for growth and advancement

Advice to Management

Don't overthink decisions.

Pros

- Compensation and benefits are pretty good.

- Very limited work travel as an analyst.

- Collegial atmosphere among most staff. People are non-competitive with each other, generally very bright and friendly, and collaborative.

- Work on varied and often really major cases (billions of dollars at stake, headline issues). Can really get exposure to a variety of work and tasks.

- Several of the major cons below developed recently as the firm has grown. The firm is totally capable of fixing them if they put an intentional effort into it.

Advice to Management

- Conscientiously focus on how to maintain a development pathway for analysts and not have them get stuck with repetitive, uninteresting, and tiring work.

- Remember that “Committed to Our People” is one of our core values. To lots of analysts (and above), it often feels like the first one to go. Be willing to actually invest in improving staff quality of life, maintaining a one-firm firm culture, and reducing silly corporate red tape.

- Actively show staff you care during periods of extreme busyness. Don’t be tone deaf and tout “excellent performance” during staff meetings, without recognizing for many people that has meant serious stress.

- Work to improve retention. It’s very costly (in time, dollars, work quality, and morale) to lose experienced analysts/associates.

Pros

-Exciting cases
-Collaborative work environment
-Friendly and brilliant colleagues
-Some excellent managers
-Pays very well

Advice to Management

Taking management training more seriously. Do whatever possible to make work life/balance easier.

Pros

- incredibly smart but also very friendly and supportive colleagues, many of whom have become good friends over the years
- team-oriented and non-competitive work environment, where you can learn and grow a lot
- interesting and challenging case projects - no two days are the same and I've never been bored
- very clear career path and good mentoring and advising culture

Pros

Great people! You learn a ton and there are great perks.

Pros

smart colleagues; interesting quantitative projects