Proceed with caution - Anonymous Gate One Employee Review

Thank you for taking the time to share such detailed feedback, we’re sorry this has been a negative experience for you. You’ve stated that your review is “intended as a genuine and helpful warning to anyone considering joining” and throughout your review you mainly reference the promotion process and at the end you write, “Advice to Potential Candidates: If your priority is clear and merit-based career progression, you should think carefully before joining. Many would be better off staying where they are rather than moving into an environment where progression can feel uncertain, political, and not aligned to performance.” We’re genuinely sorry that your experience of the promotion process has been personally disappointing. We urge any potential new joiners to ask during the recruitment process how promotions work at Gate One because unlike many other consulting firms, we have taken many steps for promotions not to be political or for there to be favouritism. A major step being that each promotion panel of 8 people consists of different SLT members (except for 2 ‘consistency’ members and 2 People & Talent members). Panel members are selected to be as diverse as possible in terms of different sectors/practices/accounts as well as their personal characteristics. While the promotion panel process introduced in 2024 was designed from external best practice benchmarking via an external consultancy, the People & Talent team are the ‘custodians’ of the process to ensure fairness and consistency but they don’t hold any more “power” over other promotion panel members – decisions on whether to promote or not are by unanimous decision making or vast majority. We recognise that balancing excellent client delivery, business development and internal contribution can be stretching at times, we agree with you that expectations need to be realistic (starting with agreeing reasonable objectives) and sustainable for the good of everyone’s wellbeing. Workload and expectations is a key focus on the new EVP Evolution ‘change the business’ initiative so please do feed in your views to your employee engagement network rep. You also reference the experience of being sold on client work at a higher grade than your current one. This isn’t hugely common practice but stretch opportunities are an important part of development at Gate One, but we agree that the stretch shouldn’t continue over a long period before someone is promoted to that grade. As an SLT we are working together more closely to ensure being sold at the grade above is limited and is closely aligned with promotion trajectory. Being sold at the grade above isn’t a reason in itself to promote someone, just like not being sold at the grade above isn’t a reason in itself to withhold a promotion. Thank you again for sharing your perspective.