Pros
Free bagels on Fridays Ability to work from home when needed Well known name that is recognized in the industry
Cons
Outsourcing most positions to Tata in India. People in the office are there to coordinate (and fix) the work done off-shore. Jobs that are not outsourced to India are slowly being moved to Florida, or filled by contractors, one by one as people leave (or are mysteriously let-go) and they are not shy about it, but will deny it when asked directly. Flat organization with little room for advancement. Tend to hire well-educated, bright people and place them in menial roles at low pay. They want to become an academy company (think GE, Proctor & Gamble), yet there is little movement or opportunity within Nielsen Mobile. Guess it would be ok, right out of college and you didn't know any better. As a seasoned professional....run the other way. Tend to promote people because they are there the longest, not who is qualified. Many managers can't manage a team, yet they take all the credit when their team of smart individuals succeeds despite their horrible leader. No credit is ever given to the people actually doing the work. In all my years there I never heard anyone say "good job". You bust your butt to get a project done and on-time (or early) and all you hear is negative feedback or nothing at all. Pay is below the industry standard and full bonus amounts are not paid most years. Raises are typically 1%. No respect for employees. Upper management is so far removed from the actual day-to-day operations and they believe that everything is wonderful, and ignore the bad. Most of upper management is waiting of Nielsen to go public and collect their windfall and high-tail it out of there. Processes are overly complicated and manual. Nothing is simple. One "easy and integrated" solution had a 15 page document with 8-10 steps per page that read more like the board game "Sorry" where you would get half-way through the process and have to go back to the beginning and start again. The survey process is so slow that it takes 6 months to get an update into a survey. Want to add the latest cell phone app information to your survey? Well you will have to wait through two quarter cycles until that information is being asked to the market. Nielsen Mobile's data is way behind the curve and typically outdated. Management tends to tackle the same issues over and over again by starting a project, having it fail, waiting a few months and trying it again with a new name. It's a never ending cycle. No morale left in the office. They keep creating employee engagement teams, that are really there just to pat upper management on the back and say "look we are doing a good job". People in the trenches are miserable, underpaid, and under-appreciated, yet upper management either is clueless or just does not care. HR is clueless and worthless. When you ask a question about benefits, pay, or anything for that matter, they do not have an answer for you. Hard to find information on the Nielsen internal site, so you are out of luck with any HR, benefit or payroll questions.