Pros
Friendly coworkers. Good pay. The work is usually interesting and mostof the clients are too. Nice downtown office in the Omni. Decent perks, like free gym use at the Omni.
Cons
Overall, HCB is a nice place to work, but a couple cons do stick out. There is a lot of team-building and culture-building propaganda. A lot. Its fine up to a point, but its really over-the-top when... The company lays off people about once a year. Management regularly reorganizes/restructures/reimagines the agency and sheds staff, and its hard to care about a company when its clear they don't care about you. The staff realizes this, and it doesn't help that the culture/attitude/philosophy stuff is really two-dimensional and silly. Thats because... Upper management can be really disconnected from the rest of the staff. For example, one upper manager in particular would ask whether I ever saw a particular deliverable that I actually helped create. Another upper manager gave special recognition to an assistant as "one of of the most undersung people at HCB". At 3 or 4 events! I got the feeling she just didn't interact much with anyone else. Another manager pushed our project down a particular path, then denied or mis-remembered it later when the client said try a different way. Which leads to... Sometimes communication between Management, Account and Creatives isn't great, which is a constant agency battle. A couple of my managers sort of gave up meeting with their people, so it was unclear where I stood many times. Account could be vague and repetitive describing a project (maybe too eager to please the one big client?) But that was mostly one person actually. The company culture didn't seem backstabby but the company's attention is really on new business, so that team could seem to get the "cool kids" treatment. Last, theres a lot of effort and pressure to contribute to charity projects, but they're not about making a difference as much as getting credit for it. Thats not limited to HCB, I guess.