Merkle reviews

3.5

63% would recommend to a friend

(2,776 total reviews)
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Craig Dempster

60% approve of CEO

49% positive business outlook

Merkle has an employee rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 2,776 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Merkle employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Media & Communication industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

3K reviews
1.0
Dec 23, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Above average pay and compensation

Cons

Awful Culture, Leadership lack skills, they are trying to get into marketing and advertising but it’s not what they do and they are terrible at it. Worst agency I’ve ever been at. Hell I never even spoke to HR the entire time I was there except for one day when they told us we are all getting laid off because they lost an account which they lost because they failed to do anything innovative.

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Merkle Response
7y
We are sorry to hear that you did not have a great experience. Merkle's HR department has an open door policy and we provide many channels to contact us. We encourage all of our employees to contact a member of the HR department without hesitation with any concerns. We did recently lose a large account in the Los Angeles area due to circumstances that were outside of our control. We are pleased that we were able to place more than 75% of the employees into other roles at Merkle to minimize the impact that the loss of the account had on our Los Angeles office. We appreciate all of our employees and the hard work that they put in to contribute to Merkle's success. We wish you the very best of luck in your future endeavors.
1.0
Nov 17, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Flexible work-from-home policy but it’s dependent on the client(s) you’re working on - Exposure to many of the industry’s latest tools and technologies

Cons

- “Acquire and fire” should be the company’s motto – they only grow the company by acquiring new ones without any regard for developing existing talent - If Merkle is the iceberg, then company morale is the Titanic - If you aren’t 100% billable (8 hrs/day), you should be worried about losing your job - Consistent rounds of layoffs decrease headcount and increase the workload on other employees, pushing many of them to be over 100% billable - All training is expected to be done on your own time – whether it’s skillset training or the hours of training videos Merkle makes you watch just so you know how to submit your time - Merkle has abandoned all thought-leadership and efforts of creating and driving industry standards – they now only care about how much they can utilize individuals on client accounts A note on the layoffs – there have been three rounds of significant layoffs in the past five months or so, with each round chipping away at the already diminishing morale. This should be a huge red flag to existing and potential clients alike. Merkle is laying off highly skilled (and high salaried) employees in favor of opening up reqs for new grads and others with little industry experience with the idea that they will train these employees up to be adequate to do the job. Meanwhile, the existing employees must then deal with the extra workload of the employees who were let go in addition to spending time to find, hire, and train the new employees who can’t yet contribute on client accounts. Merkle only cares about its bottom line and hitting revenue goals so the execs can get a hefty payout from the Dentsu Aegis Network (DAN) acquisition. This company is, and has been, on the down and down for quite some time now. Their strategy is to acquire companies to increase their revenue but they don’t have any plans or sound methods of integrating these acquired companies. For acquired companies, they will promise not to lay you off, and that’s true – but only for the gestation period when the acquisition is announced. Once you become fully integrated into Merkle, all promises are off the table.

1.0
Feb 26, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Extremely flexible remote work policy, a small cache of serviceable industry tool and technology resources

Cons

- A haven of toxic masculinity and a #metoo moment waiting to happen - Full of executive level leaders with not even a basic understanding of business finance and who make decisions to lay people off using bad data. Revenue attribution is broken so you may be laid off because of a "revenue drop" when the actual issue is that the revenue was mistakenly allocated to another team in salesforce. Yes, really. - The bulk of the "training" content provided is really just Merkle indoctrination materials. You won't have time to take advantage of what little training is actually useful. - If you are being treated poorly on your account, your only recourse is to quit. If you complain you'll get kicked off and if you don't have another project lined up, it's layoff time. - As a manager you will have no power and no ability to help your team get what they need to be successful - Don't believe any of those promo videos that they keep sharing, as they are being willfully dishonest by using footage of people that was captured BEFORE they were integrated into Merkle.

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Glassdoor has 3,079 Merkle reviews submitted anonymously by Merkle employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Merkle is right for you.