Not a true consulting company - Senior Associate Optimity Employee Review

However, Optimity lacks the sufficient experience and internal resources to effectively leverage or develop its human capital. Although certain industry groups are helmed by experienced and competent leaders, there are few subject matter experts or qualified managers to senior managers who can lead or train their teams, especially in the newer offices. In addition, the company is often forced to place its resources in staff augmentation roles in order to make ends meet while attempting to sell more strategic projects. This means that for years, you could be staffed as a single resource (or maybe on a small team) doing staff aug work that is understood to hold no real strategic value to either the resource (gaining new skills and experiences) or the company (leading to the opportunity for a bigger seat at the table, or making inroads into other areas of the business). Although this might be considered preferable to not being staffed at all, it's not why people join a consulting company. Lastly, Optimity is a privately held company, which means that the CEO can't really be held liable for his actions. Although Optimity does have an outside counsel that advises HR in cases of employee complaints, so far, no effort has been made to curtail the CEO's power and privileges, which makes for an unsafe working environment and contributes to the lack of trust in leadership and HR amongst the employees. Although the company undergoes a near-continuous cycle of self-examination to update its core values, performance management processes, etc., in an effort to alleviate some of these issues, there's been little to no improvement despite the number of hours burned. One could be more forgiving of this trial-and-error approach with a young start up, but given that Optimity's culture and business / internal processes have been forming over the past 8 years, it's not really clear whether the company will be able to turn it around.