Cornerstone Research Reviews

Pros

The people at Cornerstone treat each other uncommonly well, are extraordinarily bright, and work very hard. The cases that I've worked on (securities, retirement plans, merger antitrust) have all been interesting, and the level of technical skills used in the job is satisfying for someone who likes coding in R or Stata (though it can be avoided if you don't like that). I've worked on multiple front-page WSJ cases, but I didn't get to tell anyone about it because of confidentiality. Working on multiple cases at once can be stressful, but is good for varied experiences. The staffing system works well for a small firm, and I was able to consistently get on cases I was most interested in. The pay is pretty good for the number of hours that you work relative to management consulting and finance, and scales well at the analyst level past the first year. For people who are like me coming out of undergrad, I can't recommend it highly enough. From my perspective, Cornerstone has the best culture, highest pay, and most high-profile cases of any economic consulting firm. Exit opportunities are excellent and cover a wide range of options, including tech, data analytics roles, law school, econ PhD programs, and (most commonly) MBA programs. It didn't close any doors for me out of undergrad, which was important as my long-term interests weren't clear when I graduated.

Advice to Management

-Pay analysts 20% more: most of them can get jobs in tech that are less econ-focused (boo) and have fewer hours (yay)
-Work to build consistent practices firm-wide regarding data management (Git, R). Part of the practice areas are using them and other parts aren't, but the knowledge and familiarity among analysts should be uniform.

Pros

The people are very intelligent and create a bridge between academia and business.

Pros

Great culture
Incredibly intelligent, humble coworkers

Advice to Management

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

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

-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

- 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.