Cheil Reviews

- It doesn't matter how talented you are, how well you perform, or how many awards you bring home. None of that has any impact on whether you will keep a job, receive a promotion, or be recognized or appreciated in any way. It simply doesn't matter. - All that does matter is bad work-life balance and, more specifically, reinforcing a culture of bad work-life balance. If you are not visibly stressed, everyone assumes you are underworked and you'll hear about it from your manager. - I personally witnessed or experienced several harmless employee-led initiatives - spontaneous culture, the kind of thing every agency claims to want - get shut down because "some people" thought it meant "we weren't busy enough." - Their typical solution to the problem of "some people are overworked, some are not" was not to balance the work out across the whole team, but to make sure everyone was overworked. There is never "enough," there is only "why aren't you doing more?" - It would be one thing if all those nights and weekends and all that cancelled PTO was due to simple high volume and sophistication of work, but almost all of it is a consequence of poor planning, indecision, and complete acquiescence to an unreasonable client. It doesn't just hurt work-life balance and accelerate burnout, it's all very wasteful (and, insult to injury, very obviously wasteful). - Completely and utterly beholden to their one client, which means there is no true pushback to any whim or demand. You simply must do what they say and honor any timeline they give you. - Every agency is hired to take blame to some degree, but they've made an art of it, and worst of all Cheil leadership plays along. If a client decides your team is doing poor work (even if the reasons are firmly their fault, even if you've raised the flag on the issue several times, even if you were doing what the client told you to do), you will be blamed. It doesn't matter if you have a paper trail as tall as you. If the client says it's your fault, for any reason, leadership will turn on you. They will sacrifice anyone to please a client who cannot be pleased. - Cheil leadership is at least as bad in terms of indecisiveness and demand. I have never seen an agency lose every single pitch like this one has, and this is because leadership simply cannot make up their minds. I have never before seen pitches go to double-digit rounds of revisions before, but I saw it multiple times here. - Despite the fact they only ever lose, leadership never reflects on their own part in these failures. They only ever blame subordinates and do the same thing over again the next time. - Adherence to the larger Cheil corporate structure only means more bureaucracy, outdated systems, strange security protocols and general IT-related agitation. About 20% of my day-to-day job was navigating the complications Cheil itself imposed on every process. - One of these bureaucratic tricks is that they only promote and give people raises at the turn of the year. A frequent tactic was to "promote" people in the early part of the year (to make up for their frequent layoffs) - except they would receive no official title or pay bump until the NEXT year, with no retroactive pay. Many companies try to get more work out of people than they pay for, but Cheil is very open about it. - Review processes for creative work are inconsistent or nonexistent. Work will frequently be taken from creatives (or whole teams) and given to another team to revise without explanation. Growth is not possible in this system. - It is very hard to get a straight answer about why any decision was made. I have more than once seen leadership simply lie about why people were laid off, or why big decisions were made. - In sum: only a few voices in this agency truly count. You can create strong processes, win prestigious awards, surpass all KPIs and cultivate strong team culture, but if you're not doing things the way those handful of people want them done, you're always one excuse away from being fired.