KPMG reviews

Prepare to have no life outside of work. Never in my life could I have ever imagined working this much. You work on weekends, sometimes 7 days a week, often times without charging the time or getting recognized for putting in the effort to meet unreasonable budget and time deadlines that your managers will never commend you on. Prepare for 40-55 hr work weeks during summer and 80-100+ hr work weeks from September-April. Your clients will never be pleased to see you, no matter how good you are, and they will in fact make that known to you at all times. Some are often very difficult to work with or get the right information from. On top of everything, the salaries they are offering are much lower than the mid tier firms for some unknown reason and when you calculate the number of hours you put in compared to your pay you might be making somewhere near $12/hr while they charge the client $350/hr for your services. They give you 25 days PTO but implemented 7 days of mandatory PTO, further reducing your paid vacation/sick time to about 18 days. Its not uncommon to get bad performance reviews for taking PTO at times that are not advantageous to the firm. For example, if you book a vacation a year in advance and due to client push back the engagement doesn't finish on time but you leave for vacation, that will negatively be frowned upon no matter how out of your hands the situation may be.

You are working a minimum of 15 hour work days during high utilization periods. Management typically sell work to clients with unreasonable deadlines that are usually hard-set and cannot be changed. You have to prepare lots of binders for your projects, most of the BIG 4 companies have electronic workpapers, however KPMG has not made the step. While there are some good people at KPMG, I wouldn't recommend working there. The only way I would recommend somebody take a job there is if they absolutely have their mind set on working for a Big Four firm and have gotten turned down by Deloitte, PwC, and E&Y. While the other three firms may or may not have an environment similar to KPMG, they at least have the top technological tools for you to use. If you don't care whether you work for a Big Four firm or not, I would recommend going to either Grant Thornton, RMS McGladrey, or BDO. At the firm I was at, I felt the partners were a lot more honest and down to earth than at KPMG. While I still had to work long hours, it usually wasn't as long as at KPMG and it was never due to lack of technology slowing us down.