Pros
Disclaimer: I worked at GLG in Austin for approximately four years as my second job out of college. I left voluntarily for greener pastures. These are my general opinions of GLG based on my time with the company. Here’s an unbiased, realistic, sneak peek at what GLG is, an evaluation of management, and a brief summary of life at GLG.
Cons
What is GLG? You applied to GLG – congratulations! What is this company though? The website offers an appealingly vague “We bring the power of insight to every great professional decision” and “GLG is the world’s leading platform connecting business to insight.” Okay, sounds nifty. But, what do I do? Well, let’s take a look at the job descriptions. Let’s take a look at “Associate, Financial Planning & Analysis” in New York, NY, United States. That sounds impressive. “This highly visible role will include significant exposure to and interaction with key business stakeholders.” Nice! That’ll look really impressive on my resume! So what type of meaningful, fulfilling, stimulating, and challenging work will you be doing all day? Here’s the most concise way I can convey it: You will diddle on LinkedIn and make cold-calls for approximately 8-10 hours a day. You see, notwithstanding the delusions of many employees and whoever fabricates these job descriptions, you are not a “consultant” or a “researcher.” You will arrive to an empty spot (GLG doesn’t provide desks, private space, or offices to its employees, as it is an “activity-based” format - something they try and sell as being innovative and cutting-edge, but in reality is more cost effective and makes the vast turnover percentages more manageable) and proceed to open your email. You will then have an automated email from a “client” with a “research request.” This will ultimately be some bozo from a hedge fund, private equity firm, or an actual consulting firm telling you that he needs information on a topic – perhaps a business the private equity firm is considering investing in. So what’s your role in this? Well, you won’t be doing any research on the investment opportunity. Nor will you be consulting on any strategies or solutions. No, you will log-in to GLG’s internal database of “experts” – people with actual jobs who use GLG as a way to make quick and easy side money – and use key-words to search for someone who has either worked at the business, or has significant knowledge on the business (think as close to insider-trading you can get before breaking the law). You will then send this person automated emails attempting to organize (i.e., schedule) a phone call between that “expert” and the “client.” That is your job. If you’re unable to find an “expert” on the internal database, then you spend the rest of your day on LinkedIn searching for anyone and everyone who has either worked at the business, or has significant knowledge on the business. You will then begin contacting this person in any manner available to schedule a phone call between him and the client. That’s your responsibility, your job, and your career. There’s nothing more to working at GLG than performing monotonous and trivial tasks. Ultimately, you will be a gopher parading around as if you actually have a fulfilling career. Management I’ll keep this short and sweet – management at GLG is a joke. Not a funny joke like how The Office was before Steve Carell left. But a shockingly incompetent, arrogant, and egotistical joke. If you examine many of the current employees at GLG on LinkedIn, you’ll see quite a few “Vice Presidents” of different made-up departments. This is because after you have satisfied your gopher role for a few years, GLG doesn’t really have anything else to offer you. Therefore, very quickly, many of the wiser and more aspiring gophers will leave GLG to find a job that offers an actual opportunity of career progression. The gophers who remain ultimately end up as “Vice Presidents.” You’ll find many “Vice President, Financial Services” or “Vice President, Private Equity Solutions” employees. These “Vice Presidents” typically will have a degree in Philosophy, Art History, or Eastern-European Theater, with absolutely no knowledge or experience in any sort of financial services work. Furthermore, you’ll see the majority of these “Vice Presidents” have minimal (if any) work experience prior to GLG. Basically, at some point, a gopher must make a choice. Either the gopher cuts its losses and pursues a real career, or the gopher chooses complacency, and waits to become a “Vice President” of an industry they in all likelihood can’t even define. One last note on “management.” You’ll find an oddly high amount of “Vice Presidents” and other “Associates” from Vanderbilt. We used to call it the “Vanderbilt Pipeline.” There’s no way to figure out how this came to be. But it appears that the first generation of GLG gophers – who have now been working there for ~10 or so years, and have God knows what title HR came up with – who graduated from Vanderbilt with an invaluable degree in Art History or Taxidermy, were fixated on hiring graduates of Vanderbilt with degrees in majors I personally did not know existed (you paid $100,000 for an undergraduate degree in Egyptology?) and the tradition has lived on. So, there you have it. GLG does not have a management team consisting of experienced, diversified, and insightful individuals. No, they have a management team consisting of mostly Vanderbilt gophers who had no better option than to burrow into GLG and wait for HR to think of a “Vice President, ____” opportunity for them. Summary GLG isn’t all bad. They pay you a very reasonable entry-level salary. They have office locations in highly enticing locations. Most of your co-workers are still early in their careers. It’s not a bad first job, and it wasn’t an awful second job. But, before you accept the job offer, just know what you’re actually getting into. You will not be a consultant. You will not work in research. You will not acquire transferable skills to help your career progress (if you don’t believe me, look at the profiles of GLG employees on LinkedIn – nearly all of them copy and paste the company description from the website because “gopher” isn’t exactly eloquent). So there you have it. I hope whatever decision you make works out for you! Cheers.
