If it seems too good to be true, it usually is.
Pros
My first 18 months with the company were great and helped me decide that PR was what I wanted to do. The opportunity to travel was there, I was on a great wage for a company based outside of London, and I got to work on some genuinely interesting projects. I have stories I will tell for the rest of my life.
Cons
I was originally going to give more stars based on the first year and half with this company, but I cannot in good conscience give more than 1 star for the state of the company as I knew it when I left. Yes you get to travel, but it quickly becomes expected and employees are taken for granted. You will find yourself having to travel at very short notice and very often. The upsetting part of this is that although this is a company that throws lots of money at ridiculous situations (I will come onto this), they skimp on travel arrangements, often leaving you with ridiculous flight/travel times across convoluted routes that make no sense to anyone bar the company credit card. There is no work-life balance whatsoever. Yes you are paid what seems like a great wage, but when you lose your weekends, evenings, mornings, and some bank holidays, breaking the annual wage down to an hourly rate means you are being paid a pittance and treated awfully to boot. The "contracted hours" you get given don't mean a thing. Your contracted hours are 24/7 here. (And to the positive review saying "this is compensated by a one hour lunch break though" - that is not something worth bragging about and in all honesty, you won't get to have most of your lunch breaks anyway, as the CEO will shame you in front of colleagues for not working.) Whatever your role at PRM, you will work about 20 positions, including (but not limited to) PR, sales, full time for the sister company, IT manager, travel agent, personal driver and childcare for the CEO and her family, office cleaner, personal shopper, the list goes on. You will be asked to carry out ludicrous tasks that should not fall under your job description, but somehow do because "you signed a contract to work for this company" and "we are one big family". I have always hated the "family" mentality, and at PRM it is taken to new disgusting heights. If this is how they treat family, I am glad to have nothing to do with them. Unless you are Greek, or the CEO has just taken a shine to you, you will be treated like dirt at this company in an environment that breeds negativity and seems to encourage bullying. I often witnessed my team start to panic when certain members of management would arrive at the office, even when they had done nothing wrong. It is the unhealthiest environment I have ever experienced. If you do fall into the above categories of Greek or personal flavour of the week, you will get away with anything. I have seen management-level employees have screaming rows in the street, I have seen them be incredibly unprofessional in front of clients, and I know that they have even stolen from clients, with no repercussions. On the other hand, I saw a junior member of the team ask to leave the office at 9pm as they needed to pick up keys to their new house, and was told that if they left then, they should not expect to come back. A small team of us stayed until after midnight that night even when the CEO went home hours before, to pick up the slack from a member of staff who went on holiday and left us in the lurch with urgent tasks - that person of course faced no repercussions. On a similar note, the CEO will threaten employees with being fired over the smallest and most ridiculous matters. In my exit interview when I brought this up, I was told this was just the way it goes. 99% of the time, the threat was not followed through, but to hear this phrase directed at somebody in the office as a daily occurrence does not make it a nice place to work. Any perceived issue the CEO decides she has with you will be aired in front of the whole office. There is no such thing as professional feedback here, instead you will just be berated and shamed and made an example of in front of the rest of the team. Your choices do not matter at all here. Even if you are told that you can go and talk with your family and decide if what is being asked of you is possible or asked if it is something that you are comfortable doing (ie a month abroad on 4 days’ notice) you will be called ‘stupid’ and bullied by the CEO if your decision does not align. I said it before, but there is ZERO work life balance, ZERO chance for you to have a life, ZERO chance that you will have any say in anything for as long as you work here. Signing a contract with PRM is equivalent to signing away your soul. The money situation mentioned before - the CEO will often throw obscene amounts of money at throwing summer and Christmas parties, which sounds great on paper, but these take the form of away days that are actually away weekends, in a distant part of the country and consist of forced fun and work that the employees will need to break their backs over to ensure it happens. My last christmas "party" with this company took place out in the sticks 200 miles away from our office under threat of firing, even for those colleagues who were flown in from Greece, Portugal, and California, with a coach-load of bags and equipment that needed unpacking at midnight. When we arrived, the CEO somehow decided she did not like the place she herself had booked and just left around 40 employees in the house overnight, before waking us early the next day with a call telling us to book transport, repack all of our stuff and come to a hotel another 30 miles away. For the handful of people who ensured this all happened, myself included, it felt like we were being blamed for a poorly planned and terribly executed event. We were even made to feel bad once we returned from the trip as she reminded us that she had spent £50,000 on a party for us, like that was supposed to help us. Honestly, everyone would have just preferred a little bonus or a nice gesture, not a 4 day chore that was missold as a treat. All of this only scratches the surface of everything that is wrong with this company. I know many ex-colleagues who opted to leave PR altogether after working here. This is a place that will crush you and spit you out over and over again. The front door may as well say 'Abandon hope all ye who enters here'. A year on from my time with this company and I am still angered by things that happened during my stint there and I still suffer from bouts of anxiety; even writing this review has made me worry about things that happened 12 or more months ago. I would not wish this company on my worst enemy, and it has become my least favourite place of work in my career. I have stories I will tell for the rest of my life.
