Pros
Free coffee, free lunches in some offices, generally competent and energetic recent-college-grad environment. These are well meaning people doing their best in a corrupt and soul sucking industry. You will get extremely good at time management and clocking your entire life by 10-15 minute segments. Like way better than all of your friends unless they work in consulting. You will become skilled at holding your bladder for longer and longer periods without wetting yourself or getting an infection during work hours. Your eyes and head will adapt to staring at your screen nonstop and you will stop getting headaches from these things. You will learn how to speak professionally to everyone and constantly watch what you put in writing on company servers, even when they are not speaking or acting professionally towards you. You will learn how to filter between spam calls, client calls, and expert calls that all flow to your personal phone after hours, as you do not get a company phone. You will learn how to "catch up" with office friends in under 60 seconds with minimal to no eye contact, with the assistance of the plentiful caffeine that makes everyone talk as if they're reading out the legally-mandated side effect information for a pharmaceutical advertisement. You will learn that there are several companies in the expert network space that do the exact same thing as GLG - trawling LinkedIn Recruiter for "CEOs" and "SVPs" and doing the horrendously boring grunt work of introducing rich people to other rich people so that they can make each other richer. Because there are so many companies doing this, and GLG clients have subscriptions with several of them, there is never the option to slow down, as your ability to instantly react to a client's request at any hour of any day is as crucial to your success in this job as it is across the industry at large. You will learn that everything at this company is a game and to get promoted you need to score better than everyone else in your segment, and that management has no real way to help you in this industry outside of pushing you to keep working harder. You will get good at working hard and making your performance numbers look good. You will learn not to take GLG up on its "unlimited" PTO, as this tanks your score, and you will instead care for your mental health by learning how to efficiently stem your panic attacks with a visit to the company-sponsored Calm app on your phone. If you ever make it past the above and get the chance to feel a semblance of relief by being promoted to management for your years of hard work, you get the privilege of dealing with stressed out, jittery, anxious, and overworked employees whose numbers all need to increase, all the time, forever, despite economic turmoil, war, disaster, pandemics, and clients simply not remembering to answer your emails. You will learn that goalposts are always moved, that nothing is ever complete, no score is ever good enough, and in this Sisyphean hell of an industry where you're expected to enter with a smile pasted on your face every day for check in at 9am, you need to be the shining light of inspiration to keep on chugging for a team that desperately needs a break.
Cons
The stress you bear 24 hours a day, 7 days a week while employed at GLG in a client service role is not commensurate with your salary. It is an around-the-clock job as the clients you're dealing with are associates at consulting firms, private equity firms, and hedge funds who are trying to do due diligence on companies they want to invest in (read: insider trading). They are some of the neediest, rudest, most arrogant people you ever had the displeasure of crossing paths with at frat parties in college, they make at least double what you make, and you're expected to keep the same schedule as them because you are their administrative assistant. They are working to hit VP by age 26, at which point they will become millionaires, or close to it, while you will barely scrape 90k as a people manager, with the same amount of time spent in both jobs and none of the prestige or career transfer power of working at a financial institution. You are expected to do absolutely everything they ask, and are tasked with 20-30 of these clients and their projects each week. From the day that you start, your inbox is immediately an out-of-control explosion of competing communications and meetings, and it never ceases outside of severe economic downturns and occasionally on Christmas day. It took me years across several role changes to learn how to safely filter out the noise without missing information essential to my job. As a client service associate/manager, you will be expected to handle anywhere from 50-200 emails each day, each of which require their own background tasks, and there is no guarantee that your additional work will translate to a higher metric score for yourself (which your promotion depends on) as some clients simply use GLG less frequently than others do or have more niche needs. Regardless, management has no choice but to poke around looking for tiny pockets for you to work ever harder, as competition is extraordinarily fierce and there is no real "edge" yet to be discovered in this industry. Every competitor is doing the same thing - clients will tell you over and over they see no difference between GLG, AlphaSights, and Guidepoint. Each is simply a vendor to them, with little opportunity for you to develop a true relationship. Each new expert network that joins this industry is more of a redundancy than the last, fighting ever harder for scraps of the private equity/hedge fund/consulting research pie. It's gotten so bad that any seasoned professional with a LinkedIn has already been peppered with InMail requests to join multiple expert networks by the time your client's request hits your inbox. For this reason too, success feels further away every year, and turnover in client service at GLG is constant - HR told me that the average employee tenure is 11 months. And GLG is one of if not the top provider in this entire industry globally. I worked at GLG for over 5 years, working my way up the corporate ladder from recruiter to client service team leader. I needed this job to pay off student debt, and the GLG paycheck helped me do that. I tried my hardest to align myself with the company goals but ultimately I found it too difficult to buy into the mission, and once my debt was paid off I was left exhausted with low self esteem, and too burnt out to want to jump back into the job market. My mistake was staying far longer than I should have, hoping I would come around and that my hard work would be rewarded. But to keep climbing the ladder you really need to believe in what they're saying about "helping professionals make better decisions," so that you can inspire your teammates and distract them from the fact that their work life is measurably worse than it needs to be for what they're being paid. So if you don't have debt or a big reason for needing money, my advice is to get this job right out of college and then instantly start applying elsewhere. If this is what you need to pad your resume after a non-STEM degree and not being born rich, go ahead and do it, but exit to something better as quickly as you possibly can. GLG will certainly teach you how to navigate being exploited and then do the exploiting in the modern American corporate workplace.