Booz Allen Hamilton reviews

Benefits and opportunities keep getting cut. High performers are getting 2% raises even in growing markets (e.g., health), and average performers are getting 0%. Opportunities to do business development (proposal work and white papers) are rare now because of the increased emphasis on direct labor - some of us who used to be 85% billable now are set at 95%, so any additional work you want to do or are required to do is all on what would have been your own time. This is starting to hurt the company's business prospects, because fewer strong performers are raising their hands for things that will help in the long term (white papers, proposal work, etc) and are focusing only on billable work - that is the most important thing. The acquisition by Carlyle a few years back has chipped away at our available overhead. Overhead is what pays for marketing work, thought leadership, team building, covering strong producers who are on the beach for a short period of time, even things like new hire lunches. When Carlyle sold a division of Arinc to Booz (yes, Carlyle sold a division to itself, essentially), that meant a chunk of our overhead now goes to pay Carlyle for buying something that it still owns. When we took out a loan to pay dividends to our shareholders (mostly Carlyle), that meant a chunk of our overhead goes to paying back our loan. Carlyle uses Booz as a magic money machine. Our leadership at Booz will say again and again that Carlyle lets them manage us without interfering - but that is only true so far as managing what is left after Carlyle squeezes out more cash. People who have been here forever are finally leaving. I'm just waiting for the right lifeboat, myself.

The upper management, principals and above are very disconnected from the organization. I was in the firm for over a year yet the only time I met my principal was when he hired me and when he laid me off. The staffing process is a joke, there is no process you are expected to apply to each job as you would externally and have go to through the same process (i.e. multiple interviews, non responsive hiring managers, recruiters and even negotiate salaries due to salary caps). There is no help from the internal resource managers. In terms of work, most of the work is staff augmentation. There are very limited consulting opportunities, for the most part BAH is operating as a staffing firm where it fills seats with its resources. BAH hired several hundred people for its new "commercial practice" yet laid them off within a matter of 3-6 months so job stability is non-existent. You are expected to take any project whether it is a skillset match or not or even aligned with your career goals just to keep your job. There is no severance process, you are just given a 2 week notice and shown the door unlike most of the top tier consulting firms. The assessment process is very cumbersome and biased. They say it is a 360 feedback yet only specific feedback is filtered into the final assessment to ensure that you get the planned "assessment"