Pros
Most of the people here have good intentions and want to do their best to save the agency. Work from home is unlimited and flexitime is brilliant. Day off for your birthday after you've been there 2 years. Free office fruit and hot drinks Company has a fun events team which try to do meals in the office or fun trips out every month, sometimes several times a month. Great for team bonding.
Cons
Hallam has recently let 12 people go, with at least one person from every department. Their excuse was that they are wanting to refocus the agency to work with larger clients and bigger pieces of work instead of smaller, low budget work. The truth is their client retention has been terrible and the agency is significantly over budget on most projects and work across the entire agency. Sadly, Hallam let go staff members who were trying to turn the agency away from disaster. We would express our concerns and suggest ways to improve the situation but we were often ignored and/or victimized because of this. Senior management are reluctant to listen to their staff and face problems in front of them. Most of these problems come from the senior management team themselves, of which a number of them are unfit to run an agency of this size. They tell you that they're listening and want to give you an opportunity to express your concerns, however, some will look like they're listening and then do nothing or tell you they're here to listen but end up talking at you for the majority of the time. You end up feeling more frustrated and like they're just paying you lip service. Hallam has a problem of recruiting staff with very little experience, promising a lot of training opportunities (and failing to deliver that) and then promoting people who've worked there a short period. This has a knock-on effect where there are people in management positions who know absolutely nothing about managing a team of people or even how to do their jobs properly. It's dangerous and epidemic across the agency. When news of the dismissal of the 12 staff members went into the media, the CEO (Susan) was quoted in multiple articles to say "the wrong people were in the wrong jobs", calling in to question our aptitude to do our jobs. Not only is this insulting, but they've asked us to work out our notice periods (in the office!) too, rather than give us gardening leave. A number of us have been asked to work freelance for them too once our notice period is over. It feels like a huge smack in the face and we now have to find work in an area that believes we're not good at our jobs (which isn't true - they let go a lot of very successful people). Aside of all this, the agency has a problem of jumping into the unknown without any plan or thought about the knock-on impact. We've had about 20 different systems (not even exaggerating) to learn and get our heads round. They seem to change on a weekly basis as the trend in the office changes. The directors don't help this and promise that changes are for the better. I longed for a day of stability. Some teams also didn't have the software they needed to do their jobs properly. When asking for industry-standard outreaching software, we were fobbed off with useless excuses and then blamed when we were unable to monitor our reach and qualify the work we were doing, which led to a dismissal. It's a joke. The entire agency is a joke and I can't wait to be rid of them.