Pros
Overall a nice PTO policy. Vacation and sick time are combined so there is some flexibility for additional vacation if you never really get sick. In the past couple years, they have wised up about health insurance offerings. Have a couple options now ranging from generic PPO to High Deduct. The company contribution to HSAs for the HD plan is somewhat nice. Being owned by BlackStone means some of the corporate discounts are decent. The facilities are nice for a company it's size. Working on the corporate side, I liked the cubicles: not too tall nor too short. Gives enough privacy while retaining a feeling of openness where you can easily communicate to your team. Since it is a "growing" company and retains a small-ish vibe, it seems easy enough to get things done in a timely manner, be they IT, HR, or process implementation. During my time there, people beneath the middle mgmt roles (those below VP) all seemed to have a genuine interest in getting things accomplished and as correctly as possible and for the most part take pride in their work. Overall, there are genuinely good people up and down through the whole corporate organization that want to achieve something while they're there. There's always something going on so the opportunities to learn different skills are plentiful... just expect a steep learning curve.
Cons
The overall compensation is a joke. The 401k match is almost pitiful. I appreciated the high cap of my contribution limit, but for all I put in I'd expect a slightly more equitable dollar match. A common refrain from the last half of my tenure was talk of a "market adjustment" on salaries, knowing they were below market for many corporate positions. It has never happened. Never was taken care of at yearly review time, just the blanket C.O.L.+1% merit increase across the board. Was there for 4 years and I can count on one hand the number of analyst levels that were promoted for merit. Aside from that, there was another handful that were promoted and left/were released shortly after promotion; another handful that got a promotion after they had came back or had other offers in hand; and another handful that received lowball counter-offers after finding promotions outside the company. It seemed the only way you could advance from a monetary or professional standpoint was to leave. Part of those (probably half) was the tumult of 2015 (as other reviews allude to) under a stop-gap CEO, and I had some faith that it would change with stability but it hasn't really seemed to occur. Maybe some of their new "Excellence" initiatives will dampen this but it'll take a while to get there. As alluded to above, attrition has been a problem at all levels, not just analyst. Corporate, synergistic-style shuffles of the org chart happen (seemingly) every 6 months. Take the attrition and org chart shuffles and it partially explains why I had 7 different direct report managers over my four years. For the good I can say about lower level workers, I cannot necessarily say about the middle mgmt. There are many hard-working and dedicated VPs across the company, so I don't want to paint with a broad brush, but it seemed like any stymie to progress or buckling of resistance resonated from office politics between middle mgmt. Maybe some of those mgrs were just looking to leverage Exeter for their next position, but it always seemed like consternation or infighting in middle mgmt would derail the best of intentions. To that point, there are (large) things that seem to perpetually be on the docket for completion that just never seem to get done, processes that haven't been buttoned down, and changes in management philosophy or direction that made it felt like we were always chasing our tail. Smaller and medium sized initiatives seem to be accomplished but it's almost like people know they won't be around long enough to finish or see the fruits of a large project so they just fall by the way side. Also to that point, it can seem like rearranging deck chairs sometimes with recurring "fire drills" that should not be happening anymore, wild goose chases that distract, and pet projects that go nowhere. If Exeter had twice the headcount in corporate, that might be fine... but as it is, it is an environment that functions on relatively few people wearing many hats (BIG hats), with immediate deadlines and expectations of results. No wonder things fall through the cracks or people get burned out.
