Please talk to former employees in person before signing up - Principal Consultant Customer Systems Employee Review

Expect to get treated like a child. Anything you say/do that is not EXACTLY in line with what the MD is thinking will get you in trouble. You WILL not have any freedom to express your ideas or choose your specialisation. I know for a fact that the positive reviews on this site and by either the MD himself or senior management at his request - My source: I still know people who work in the company; Also, please note that the only 3 positive reviews currently on this site are all written within a few days of each other. When the leadership of an organisation resort to such tactics, especially with such level of personal involvement on something that is written online, you only need to extrapolate this scenario to figure out what happens within the actual firm. The MD, in his replies to the negative reviews, keeps talking about how many existing and former employees keep praising Customer Systems about how fortunate they were to have worked there: My humble advice would be - Please ask the existing employees or any former employees directly for an honest opinion about Customer Systems, more specifically about the management, and then make up your own mind about the company. Now let me address some of the myths that are being propagated with these positive reviews that are on this site: [client list that is second to none] I can name at least 5 IT consultancies off the top of my head (Google for the biggest IT consulting firms in the UK), that work in the same technical spheres as CS (Siebel CRM, OBIEE and SAP CRM), that have more influential and bigger clients than CS. [solve their problems at a fraction of the cost and faster than the big consultancies] The scale of the projects most "big consultancies" deal with are out of the league of what a company like CS can even do, simply because they lack the resources. Conversely, big IT consulting firms are not interested in smaller projects simply because it is not financially viable for them. In a scenario like this, how can a fair comparison be made? Please elaborate. Additionally, if this were true, then why is it that we lost so much business in the last year (We had some of our biggest and longstanding clients leave us)? The amount of work available in the technical spheres of CS's "expertise" has not declined in the last 3 years. [People that I worked with at Customer Systems have progressed similarly and amongst these I see another MD, senior execs at software companies and at all of the main consulting firms, senior managers at many large international corporates] Really? It is absurd that none of the other ex-CS employees know of any one who currently is an MD, Senior Exec or even a Senior Manager at ANY of the major IT consulting firms. I don't know about how the reviewer qualifies a company as a major IT consulting firm, but if it is anywhere along the lines of how most people would define it, this statement is definitely NOT true. [Take with a pinch of salt the views of a consultant who is surprised at a dress code which is simply to wear a smart business suit, white shirt and tie.] Could the MD of CS show me a positive co-relation between employee productivity and wearing white shirts to work? No. The reason being there is none. It's not 1960 and your certainly not Don Draper. Get over it. [Integrity: Steve and Duncan made this central. Many firms pay lip service.] Yes; hiring someone that has no prior work experience, training him for 6 weeks and then selling him to the client as a highly experienced consultant is the epitome of integrity. I'm not saying other firms don't do this, but Mr. Pot, I would appreciate it if you could stop picking on Mr. Kettle.