BDO reviews

3.5

62% would recommend to a friend

(10,353 total reviews)

Pat Kramer and Peter van Laer

73% approve of CEO

57% positive business outlook

BDO has an employee rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 10,353 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The BDO employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Finanzas industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

10K reviews
2.0
Dec 25, 2019

NOT A PLACE TO BE

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

BDO SF has some interesting client works for anyone that has passion of doing taxes. This is a great place for anyone who is fresh out of college. You can join the firm without any basic accounting knowledge. If you do not know how to complete a balance sheet, you can still survive at this office. Your senior and above will roll up their sleeves and wrap up the work for you. For first year staff, if you just want to do what you are told without thinking thoroughly, this is the place for you. If you are okay that you only get to do less than five returns for a year, this is the place for you.

Cons

The scheduling is a mess. Your managers, sr. managers or partners do not communicate to each other when there is a priority issue. They do not give real feedback to staff on real time basis even though they tell you they will at interviews. You will be very surprised to hear a lot of comments after the career round table discussion. People falling behind do not receive proper guidance and feel sad to come to work. The office culture and environment are very bad - talking behind, yelling, and the worse - since it is an open space environment, your senior, manager will look at your screen and see what you are doing (even you are doing client works.) I will leave you to judge whether this is the professional environment where you want to be.

2.0
Dec 3, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Huge resources. People available to do or assist in all areas - technical and administrative. Nice building. Free fruit and coffee. Generally a pleasant atmosphere and increasingly inclusive. A good place for the shrinking few who can make it to partner or for senior staff with no ambition who want a so so salary and an easy, cosseted life. Good training support for junior staff.

Cons

Much diminished pay and opportunities for senior staff - increasingly exploitative attitude to senior staff. Partner incomes have grown massively - 20%+ per annum recently whilst staff income have shrunk continuously in real terms over the last 10 years - e.g. 1% standard increase last year. Little loyalty to staff when it comes to progression - more interested in continually bringing in people from outside - generally on much better packages. Increasingly corporate culture. Large numbers of people not productively occupied. A general sense partners are making too much money too easily now to have any real interest in staff or in investing in their development. An increasingly difficult firm to go out to sell in the market place because there’s a growing perception in other professional firms that BDO are overpriced and are too often churning mediocre work. Quite openly benchmarking and seeking to be just like the Big 4 now. However, without Big 4 benefits or e.g. retirement of partners at 55 to make way for the next generation. Too many ageing and disengaged partners hanging around now to milk their equity earnings. An accelerating hollowing out of expertise as more directors go off to be partners in other firms and partners churn more work through inexperienced junior staff.

3.0
May 29, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Office location, good people on the bottom level, company is growing

Cons

Feels like being back in school, top heavy, progression will take years, low salary for the market, benefits are standard

Viewing 283 - 285 of 10,353 Reviews

Glassdoor has 15,168 BDO reviews submitted anonymously by BDO employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if BDO is right for you.