CRH reviews

3.6

61% would recommend to a friend

(1,108 total reviews)

Jim Mintern

61% approve of CEO

53% positive business outlook

CRH has an employee rating of 3.6 out of 5 stars, based on 1,108 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The CRH employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Construction, Repair & Maintenance Services industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

1K reviews
1.0
Sep 5, 2017

Vice President

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Most divisions have a good work life balance most of the time. "Entrepreneurial" culture give most businesses flexibility in decisions

Cons

- All divisions of the organization function very autonomous leading to wildly different business cultures, brand names, processes, policies and communications tools. This can cause significant confusion to both employees internally and customers externally. Many divisions are on different emails and telephone networks, leading to regular situations where customers calling one division and needing to talk to another division where the best the employees can do for the customer is to give them the external 1-800 number of the other division. - Acquired companies frequently keep their original names leading to many employees completely unaware they work for CRH and oblivious that locations of other company divisions are operating in the same city. - Career advancement is almost entirely dependant on finding a senior leader to guide you through the convoluted organization and get you to be part of the "in" group and highly subject to change with senior leadership changes. I am actually considered part of this group and even from the inside it as deeply troubling. - Rapid career advancement available to those willing to rapidly and regularly willing to relocate but little to no support or guidance is given for employees taking on challenging roles and if there are any mistakes or perceived failures employees are either let go or demoted and given a long standing "low potential" assessment. - Performance management is really only focused on admin and manager level positions with the concept of the "talent pipeline" being focused on only senior leadership. Performance of front line employees is highly variable by division but mostly non-existent except for a few specific business sub-divisions.

1.0
Mar 3, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

After my second week people complemented me on surviving with the CFO. Gained experience solving my own problems due to lack of training and cross departmental assistance.

Cons

Supervisor had no leadership skills. Ran prior 2 analysts off within their first 2 weeks. Silos within departments where information is with held in pathetic attempt to protect job. Nobody documents any of their processes which creates one man shows. The developer of their salescube left no designs so any questions about it go out to him for a consulting fee! Makes it hard in a finance role when no one can answer how they calculate sales, etc inside their own system. Upper management has unrealistic expectations of the level of effort to get up to speed on their system and is hostile towards suggestions and developments to improve processes once you are. Decentralized structure means for the several months I was there that I rarely spoke or worked with anyone other than supervisor.

4.0
Sep 13, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Anyone reading reviews about Oldcastle in this or any other forum should realize that the context, location, reviewers working position and even business operation is important and relative to these reviews. I will make an attempt to generalize on all of Oldcastle from what I know from working 12 years with this organization. Unfortunately, a lot of reviewers display their own ignorance of the structure and business operations and don't realize that they are generalizing "Oldcastle" as a whole. No one can truly rate Oldcastle unless they can claim to have worked in every P&L operation to determine a generalization of Pros and Cons. I will sum it up like this, in Oldcastle, you’re either a leader or a follower. The leaders are the ones that rise above their own circumstances and are able to make a successful career at Oldcastle.

Cons

Oldcastle is a subsidiary of CRH plc out of Ireland. The business model of CRH is to finance and support acquired local and regional operational leaders in the building materials industry. The operational leader’s goals are to deliver performance and growth to CRH's investors. The pro and con to CRH is that CRH has always realized that they can't successfully manage and dictate how operations should be run. CRH believes that the success of the CRH investment portfolio depends on the local operational leaders to manage their employees and local business partners. CRH has a proven success record of not managing operations behind a corporate desk in Ireland. Of course there are cases where operation managers have run amok, but in my opinion this is a classic 80/20 rule.

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