BDO reviews

The promotions and staff evaluation are not fairly based on performance but on getting close and personal with the partners. Women, in particular, do not get equal opportunities for carrier development and thus equal pay. BDO used to give opportunity for a good work life balance but since the new management took over this is not the case anymore. It is increasingly stressful with a focus on financial targets and compromising the quality of work to meet budgets. Generally people lack basic communication skills and it is very hard to be a new starter as nobody would be bothered to make you feel welcome or even talk to you. There is a culture among some managers to ignore totally people below their level unless working on their project. All this makes the atmosphere in the office very tense. Although the pay might be similar to the competitors, bonuses are something unheard of. The staff appraisals are focused on the negatives and development points. They are designed in such a way as to make you feel not good at your job. This is also the attitude in communication between senior and more junior members of staff; on many occasions instead of thank you people are told that they are not good enough and are inefficient. Overall there must be better places to work.

Despite the fact that the firm has been around for 80+ years, the name is not well-recognized by either potential clients or potential employees making networking and recruiting difficult. There's an "every man for himself" type of culture throughout, senior to senior, manager to manager, partner to partner, but especially across business lines. So much so, that I've even heard one partner in one business line refer to others in another business line as "competition". Most business lines don't even know the names of the other employees across business lines and have no clue about what they do. Probably typical of all mid-tier firms, there's an overall sense that the firm just follows the lead of the Big 4.