Company: Deloitte
Date: 2014-10-17
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Confirmed

The awesome staff and client challenges save this review from being one star. Read CONS.
Pros: You'll find some of the finest workers at all levels. I met some of the most creative, intelligent, humble, and professional staff, and worked at the absolute highest levels of top tier clients. I worked with a humble senior executive who I'd find drying the countertops in the men's room, just because it needed doing. Great leaders.  The work is meaningful, and typically is focused on solving important, expensive, complicated problems. You may even work with "names" that you see in the news. Pretty cool stuff. Weigh that CAREFULLY against the CONS below.
Cons: Along with all the good people, you will encounter some top-notch jerks, spoiled frat boys, and back-stabbiing managers at Deloitte. It's all about the numbers, your metrics, so some will poach staff from other teams, lay blame at subordinates feet, and game the HR/Review process (Google "Rank and Yank") by hiring shills that they will fire later to keep their teams in place.  In any given HR review cycle, which is a ridiculously complicated back-room evaluation called "consensus", where a third party presents your case for continued employment to a small group of HR and partners. The goal? Find the 70% that should be kept, the 20% that should be promoted, and the 10% that WILL be fired. Oh, and by the way, that process essentially brings the delivery at the firm to a standstill for the month of May every year. I'll call it out as others have, forget Work/Life Balance. Once you have your forty billable hours, you have about 40 more hours weekly of expected "Firm Contributions" where you must author white papers, proposals, lead training, and lots of other things the the partners are too cheap to pay to have done. So they blackmail the non-PPDs (staff) into doing this stuff that most other firms PAY people to do, by making Firm Contribution impacts a MEASURED part of your evaluation. Keep in mind, this is an $8 Billion firm, which from the CEO on down, REQUIRES people to work for free, beyond their billable client service. To me, that not just unethical, it borders on illegal. Lastly, when the firm is going to let someone go, there is an elaborate system designed to keep former employees from filing for unemployment benefits. First, after consensus, we'd put people on a Performance Improvement Plan. Give them a couple months to try to rectify the shortfall that put them in the "Yank" 10%. Once they haven't rectified it, call them into a meeting where we'd confiscate badge and laptop, explain they are no longer in service at Deloitte, and explain all the "parting gifts"-- which are actually means by which the firm hopes you won't file for unemployment. Staff get some "salary continuation" for some weeks, and continued coverage of insurances, job placement coaching which stresses "take less salary and get employed faster". Again, it's a nice separation package, but the intent isn't benevolent, its purely to keep unemployment claims (and insurance) minimal for the $8billion firm. Please, before you join Deloitte, weigh the pluses and minuses and interview a lot of OTHER firms, and ask tight questions around all you've read here. Deloitte is crazy--like a fox.