Pluspunten
The company used to hire very bright and driven people. Given the hours that your butt was expected to be in your seat, the people were the brightest spot at the company. Free coffee and friendly baristas are also an undeniable perk even if the service only exists to keep your butt in your seat for a greater percentage of any given day. Austin is a fun and relatively cheap city - perfect for GLG's pay scale.
Minpunten
The work - Though the job description has changed marginally since I applied, it is still fairly misleading. What was billed as a research position was actually a glorified secretarial/head hunter mashup. The work itself is mind bendingly boring. Scheduling calls and browsing linkedin do not require much, if any, training. The most challenging part of the job is ramping up on all of the proprietary (made up) lingo. Work life balance - This frequently comes up in critiques of GLG for a good reason. 10-11 hour days are expected. The firm assigns outsize value to being seen in your seat after 7pm regardless of whether there is any actual work to be done. Weekends are not protected, in fact working on weekends is expected. Management - From senior leadership down to team leaders, the management at GLG is fraught with issues. GLG consistently rewards loyalty. Thus, some of the more senior leaders (at least in the Austin office) have been rewarded for years of service rather than business acumen. This results in managers who may have been highly efficient at scheduling calls and hyper responsive to emails (all qualities of an A+ GLGer) but have little to no people leadership ability. Poor management is compounded by the practical absence of an HR department. The unlimited vacation perk that is used to draw in recent grads is actually in the hands of a maybe-competent manager. In practice, this looks like some employees taking 4 weeks of and others being told to cap vacation at 10 days. Career advancement - In my, and others, experience who have interviewed at clients or anyone who has experience with expert networks, GLG has proven detrimental in the interview process. Financial Services/Consulting firms do not respect GLG and its employees--they view GLG as a glorified call center. Within GLG, career advancement is based on a black box of ever changing metrics. There was never a single performance review where I felt that I could confidently peg where on the internal "curve" I would fall. Year end bonuses are determined by where you fall on this internal curve ranked against your peers as well as a subjective review of each individual by management. This subjective piece adds to the black box mystique of performance reviews. If you get lucky and find a manager that will step up for you, the road to manager will be a breeze. Otherwise, have fun hanging out as an associate until you give up and go to Facebook.