Promote fairly or nobody will be left - Anonymous Gate One Employee Review

Thank you for your feedback, we wish you well in your new job. To respond to your advice to management first: The promotion criteria is transparent at Gate One - people need to demonstrate evidence of performing at the grade above across the three pillars of performance: Client advisory/delivery, business development (appropriate for the grade – which is very light at junior grades) and internal contribution. The 20 high performers who were promoted in February 2026 met the criteria for promotion across the three pillars. Those who didn’t weren’t promoted this time. Sometimes it was because there wasn’t enough evidence of BD but there were also examples where BD was evidenced but there wasn’t enough evidence across the other two pillars, context is also always important. Every single person who wasn’t promoted in February was provided with feedback and the next opportunity for promotion is in August. We’re sorry that you have personally been frustrated by the promotion process. As mentioned previously, we urge potential new joiners to ask about how we do promotions at Gate One as the criteria is transparent and the methodology of having a diverse SLT promotion panel that changes each time and disconnecting it from performance appraisals are good practice and was implemented following independent benchmarking. We also run the promotion panel twice per year instead of once which is another thing we do differently compared to a lot of other consultancies. The other things you’ve been frustrated with – lack of rotations on projects, the balance between BD and client delivery and our pay philosophy are all being reviewed within the EVP Evolution ‘change the business’ initiative.