Only good for lateral moves - Associate BlackRock Employee Review

3.0
17 Mar 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Excellent benefits, decent pay and bonuses, working with smart people who are mostly always open to help and share their knowledge.

Cons

Virtually no room for advancement and no attempts at employee retention, they know they can hire experienced people externally looking for work/making lateral moves in this job market the last few years. You won't be promoted but you'll have to train your new manager + many other people, since managers that only care about their career want to pad the number of direct reports they have so they can advance. - Yearly layoffs of 3-5% of their entire workforce including people there for 30 years, while hiring analyst classes of 1k people each year, diluting the culture and knowledge-base and making it difficult to find mentors. - No clear line between promotion tracks for people managers vs strong individual contributors. This means individual contributors are frequently given manager reports/responsibility despite being horrible at it, in order to get them promoted. This is only if your manager cares to align with your career goals, but they could be just a strong individual contributor themselves/only concerned with their own advancement, and view you as competition. No accountability for these types of managers - as long as you perform your job, it reflects well on them, while they reward their favorites with more visible projects and opportunities - If you are nominated for a promotion, the process itself takes almost a year. They want you already performing at that level prior to that, so you are doing the work of the next level for 1-2 years, then nominated in the Spring, and find out if you are promoted in November/December, with the new title kicking in at the new year. So promotions are a 2 year process at best. - Worst of all, employees are not able to interview for a higher level role on another team to seek a promotion internally. It is a lateral move and then the same 18-24+ month process since your new manager must nominate you. - Extremely poor HR staff - expect to get delayed responses to questions, requests for availability for interviews and then nothing scheduled until an auto-rejection email is sent, etc. - All of these things causing an overall firm-wide breakdown of processes the last few years and resulting mass-exodus of talent of people who used to enjoy working here and carry the culture, replaced with people looking to get the name on the resume - Has become no longer process-driven, phone call driven instead - as in if you are trying to document everything for audit trails, nothing will get done - people do not check their emails and managers don't escalate for responses, you need to call people and ask them nicely to get them to do their team's basic job function.

Explore other reviews about BlackRock

5.0
21 May 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great company to gain experience

Cons

Not many cons, large organization

3.0
22 Feb 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

1. The executive leaders in the firm are doing a great job 2. Many people in the firm genuinely have a sense of pride working there 3. The (base) compensation is compatible with the market; bonus, however, is another story. 4. For the first ten years of my career in the firm, I made some great memories and made some great friends.

Cons

The culture of my organization started to shift away from a sensible approach and career nurturing to a hostile and confrontational one around 2 years ago. In several all-hands meetings, we were chastised for being "too nice" and were made clear that things would change. The anonymous feedback in the meetings was cut short or eliminated entirely because it didn’t paint a positive picture. In the last 2 years, 1. I was often asked and expected to answer, "Now.. what can you do for me?" in my 1:1 with my latest manager. 2. I was reminded more than once that English is my second language 3. I was reminded more than once by the manager that I should not speak during the meetings I was invited to because they weren’t in the right timing or not appropriate to the subject being discussed during the time There were many of these examples in the last two years with the firm that just seemed inconceivable; nevertheless, I had a great ride and met some genuine people that I consider friends even today.

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