At Edelman, the range of potential clients can be so enthralling, you're almost able to forget about the time Edelman was caught in a scandal for surveying work on the Canadian equivalent of the Keystone Pipeline - or more recently, when Edelman's plan for re-branding of a group in charge of immigrant detention centers was leaked to the New York Times.
On one hand, the demand for work is there, right? Deep in the workday, your mind could remain pre-occupied with all of your recent projects. Even more, alternating between a 'purpose-driven' makeup campaigns or 'customer-focused' cleanup of an airline's latest viral mistake, it's easy to start to believe that your work can have impact for the good.
Moreover, for the data savvy - this is the wild west. Without a strong literacy of the new tools and technologies at the top of the company, small factions within the company can sell lower quality analytics projects, research, and dashboards at high premiums. Due to this foundational gap in modeling and testing, there is not a strong internal compass for statistical significance or quality insights. It can make the job easy in terms of tasks, but limiting in terms of the range of work that is proposed versus what is completed.
Managers are generally not literate in basic code languages, and you will likely be responsible for your own code and career roadmap. Could be good? Could be frustrating? For you to interpret. The wild west is not without its benefits.
However in the long run, it can start to feel like a two-steps-forward-one-step-back process. You may encounter deeply personal family and friend ties binding the upper echelons of Edelman from outsiders. You may be responsible for partnering with people who are not qualified or held accountable to their role due to their connections. Your inspiration and motivation to do great work may be at odds with the day to day asks of deeply conservative and racially homogenous organizational leaders. Additionally, you may start to get the sense that the pool of talent that fuels Edelman's operations is ultimately responsible for pushing the managerial/ HR teams beyond the edge of their comfort zone, and into the high-tech, thoughtful, and racially blended workplace of the modern times. Even when they may embrace these changes, it may frustrate you they lacked the vision change before they were asked.
If you begin to feel overworked by poor management or underpaid versus the industry standard, Edelman's client roster will likely come to mind. It's easy to think that a single person can stomach what feels like slightly more than the typical range of corporate problems in return for strong experience. If you arrive at this feeling at Edelman or you are reading as a potential hire on Glassdoor, I encourage you to ask - is the time and energy I put into this company truly coming back in equal if not increased reward?
After Edelman, my next employer gave me a 28% wage increase for the same job. They don't ask me to work on the weekends or ask for off same-day deliverables at 5PM . My manager's experience with code has already helped boost my skill set in a way Edelman could never compete with. They have long-held practices to combat climate change on an employee and corporation level, as well as serious employee diversity initiatives that pre-date the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
We, as humans, have great potential, bound by a limited time on earth. Please consider my learnings here in your decisions. You deserve to spend your limited human time on projects you believe in, in a place that gives fair reward for your contributions. Is Edelman really that place?
