Trying to decide where to start with the cons is like trying to decide which grain of sand to count first.
When you first join Diamond you will be told a whole host of wonderful things like how you will be part of a "family" and how they operate with "family values" in mind. They are, after all, a family company, run by three brothers and funded primarily, at least at the onset, by their parents. You will soon come to realize how truly dysfunctional this family is.
Unless you're in with upper management you can forget about raises or promotions. They would much rather hire from the outside than recognize the skills and talents of their existing employees no matter how long they've been with the company. People who have spent years in their roles often see no movement in their career, even laterally. In fact, there is a strong sense that many in management roles are reluctant to see their teams grow for fear of losing their own job security. You can ask for more responsibility and show an eagerness to grow but they will keep you right where you are. Sure there are a small handful of folks who have been able to move up but they are the very rare exception, not the rule.
The company as a whole is a revolving door in Hell's waiting room. You will see people come and go so often you barely have time to learn their names.
There are people at Diamond whose only jobs seem to be creating massive presentation decks no one will ever read and developing internal processes that take weeks to define and roll out but are never actually implemented. Oh, and spending a couple grand on children’s building blocks (seriously) to represent the RACI model no one ever used.
Sure there are lovely perks but those hardly make the 60-80 hour weeks during the summer worth it, but you may get a shiny new $25 LCBO gift card or 1 (one) lieu day for your troubles.
Diamond loves to spend money on things that don’t matter then dangle them in your face like they’ve done you a favour.
Full office renovations (that cost an arm and a leg, took forever, were never completely finished, were not properly planned or coordinated, had no clear creative direction, and were slapped together with shoddy workmanship), a rooftop patio (with no wifi and bizarre, constantly changing usage rules), and snacks (that disappeared within a day of delivery because people would hoard them at their desks like animals) to name a few.
What would have been more impactful were cost of living raises, adequately staffed departments, career development opportunities, in-field tech that was up to date and functional and didn’t require a prayer circle to continue working, management who respected their teams, and management who actually listened to people instead of silencing them by hiding questions they’re asked and sidestepping difficult topics.
With respect to how they handled COVID their objectives may have been set but they certainly weren’t achieved.
Their version of compassionate lay-offs included referring to the mass loss of jobs as something that was “in the best interest of the business.” They are constantly trying to protect their bottom line and nothing more. They do not care about individuals unless they’re in the “in” club.
While they may not have laid off 2/3 of the company, they were definitely swift to give marching orders to nearly 2 dozen almost immediately after going into lockdown. To my knowledge, not a single one of the laid off employees have been offered their job back. Since the layoffs, Diamond has begun hiring again and has not honoured any of their claims or promises to bring any of the laid off staff back. For some reason, they chose to hire new people (good luck to them!) rather than bring back legacy employees who had been there for years, already know the work and clients, and as previously mentioned, were promised their jobs back as soon as it was possible to have them return. It was all lies.
In fact, of those who chose termination, many were not even paid the full amount of severance that they were promised. When confronted about this, Diamond will gaslight you and tell you that they had in fact paid you everything you were owed or there were XYZ reasons, seemingly pulled from thin air, as to why they didn’t have to pay you the full amount. They love the gaslighting tactic: tell you you’re wrong, you’re imagining it, or it was likely something you had done, not them, to cause the situation. Not once in my time at Diamond has anyone from upper management, or HR as a voice for the company, owned any of their mistakes.
All of this is not to mention the failed work-share program they put a number of people on (only to lay most of them off after only a couple weeks) and the salary reductions people were forced to take. Unless of course you were part of the six-figure upper management “in” club, in which case the salary reduction was far less for you than it was for the rest of the underclassmen.
In terms of the output of work, Diamond has some of the most wonderfully talented creative people working for them who they hinder and hold back with their bland, boring direction and sycophantic TD pandering. The agency is more of a TD content factory than it is a genuine creative agency. They have put so much effort into clinging to this one tent pole client that should they ever lose TD the whole circus will be sure to collapse.
Diamond is a great place to work if you are immediately out of school and would like to spend a few months somewhere to get your feet wet, pad your resume a little bit, and learn what not to do once you finally move on to bigger and better things.