You'll be left with a Zone hangover - Employee Cognizant Employee Review

2.0
29 June 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Used to be an amazing company to work for with outstanding culture (pre cognizant). If you like massive corporations and heavy, long winded processes and no admin rights to your own laptop this is the company for you. Good volunteering services through Cognizant. They do some good work and great projects. The people are wonderful, you might even make friends for life. Moving to a new Cognizant office in Liverpool St which looks nice but will axe what's left of the culture. Seem to want to actually have a more diverse culture are doing something about it.

Cons

Hilariously a company who advises on employee experience has shocking employee experience. High turnover. No salary review for 24 months. No bonus. Seriously low salaries with low rewards. Lot's of complex employee performance reviews and then only 5% of the company get a salary review. Awful onboarding, you know its bad when the entire HR team leave. Zero recognition for employees who've worked a long service. Senior employees on less than juniors. If you do manage to get a pay rise/promotion you'll wait a year and half. Resulting in imposter syndrome when you finally do leave the company - when you get out take some time off to detox from the awful culture so you're not scarred at your new job. Leadership obsessed with hierarchy and faffing around with company structure. Axed summer and Christmas party. No budget for anything. You'll be paying for your own expenses with no hopes of getting them approved.

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Cognizant Response
3y
Thank you for taking the time to leave your feedback about working at Zone. We’re glad to read that you enjoyed working with Zone’s great people, clients and on progressive project work. We’re sorry to read the ‘cons’ to working here that you’ve listed. We understand there have been some frustrations with some of our processes whilst we have been integrating with Cognizant’s policies and ways of working; however, are proud to have navigated through Zone’s acquisition to Cognizant and the Covid pandemic over the past 5 years, adapting to remote, and more recently, hybrid working, whilst maintaining a strong and inclusive culture, and retaining many fantastic and dedicated colleagues along the way. Whilst some of our policies and ways of working have changed in the past five years since joining Cognizant, we have strived to keep employees engaged, reward new and existing employees fairly, and provide full transparency around our 24-month promotion cycle. We’ve worked hard with our Employee Experience team to assess our onboarding process, and are working to create a great onboarding experience for new employees. We have also re-introduced our Summer and festive celebrations, which were temporarily halted due to the Covid pandemic. We wish you the best of luck with your new role and thank you for helping us make the best Zone possible, through providing valued feedback.

Explore other reviews about Cognizant

5.0
27 May 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good projects, challenging work, lots to learn

Cons

The way the bench status is structured

1.0
5 June 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

A potential inroad into large client companies (Leave Cognizant ASAP) You aren't unemployed.

Cons

It's a body shop. Clients will view you accordingly. Contractors cannot be trusted with most tasks. You must be siloed (No room for growth) so you don't break anything. Your actual job is to fulfill gaps in the client's grunt work even if out of scope. If you don't, the hammer falls from client and Cognizant. Wages well below industry standards. 1% annual raises only exist because legally they must exist. Takes full advantage of H-1B slave system, where employees' families and homes will be thrown into a furnace if you aren't keeping Cognizant happy no matter what. Employees are complacent in their slavery. Management is just happy to get their extra crumbs and will reinforce the bad culture. C-suite is opaque. If you are familiar with India's caste system you will understand how "lessers" are treated. This also happens in a literal sense, you aren't totally safe just because you are the favored skin tone. Takes full advantage of modern white collar culture. "Your racist actions aren't actually racist if you aren't Caucasian." Expect the uphill battle to be even more steep if you're not Southeast Asian. You will hunt for your own work most of the time. Cognizant is not helpful in any regard. They exist to skim off the top and nothing else.

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