Merger of equals? More like hostile takeover - Manager IQVIA Employee Review

1.0
Oct 9, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Ability to work remotely, but besides that there are very few 'pros' left. Post-IMS merger, it seems that the only 'pros' this company has left to offer go to legacy-IMS employees.

Cons

The culture of the monopolistic, “take it or leave it” data company won the war over the client-focused, people-driven “do everything we can for our customers” service organization. Legacy-Quintiles was already a large, complex company pre-merger, but post-merger the organization has become much more bureaucratic and slow moving. The simplest of internal tasks now takes a month to complete. They’ve globalized and regionalized every single business unit to match IMS’ existing structure, leading to a lot of duplication of efforts and making the entire company unnecessarily complex to navigate. IMS management is attempting to run a CRO like a data company. IMS’ Management focus is only on the bottom line/share price and it's painfully obvious- now you need 2 levels of sign-offs to put a dinner on your corporate card, while Ari Bousbib takes home $38M/year. Yes, $38M per year. Literally…he’s the highest paid CEO in the pharmaceutical industry. Yes, more than the CEO of Johnson and Johnson, even though J&J company revenue is over 9x that of Iqvia, while both delivered similar shareholder gains. WELL below industry standard pay. A great Cigna PPO was replaced with awful Aetna high deductible health insurance. The stripping of virtually every employee benefit that was at one point a differentiator is now commonplace. Constant cost cutting is the norm, yet the pitch to employees through corporate-speak is that it's in their best interest (I.E the move to discretionary use of vacation time; the "sell" was that you no longer needed to accrue vacation time. But all that means is that the business no longer needs to hold liability on its books for 50,000 employee’s vacation days should they exit the company, which happened in droves.); the consolidation of 3 buildings in RTP down to 1 so now there are no permanent desks, the cutting of our gym memberships, etc. The slow and intentional squeeze and phase out of every management position held by legacy-Quintiles employees has finally trickled down to the Director/Associate Director level.

Explore other reviews about IQVIA

5.0
May 12, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

good learning opportunity and a stepping stone

Cons

sponsor driven, sloe promotions, decent pay

3.0
May 15, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Great work / life balance, leadership wonderful dependent on team, collaborative coworkers, everyone try to help each other

Cons

- internal processes too long, hard to progress career if you are not loyal to certain leaders, sometimes we get in our own way to service our customers, internal bottlenecks between sales and delivery at times. If you are someone who likes to follow processes this is a good place, if you are someone who thinks outside of the box and pushes the envelope of change for betterment or more efficiency - you could be frustrated

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