media planner

analytics manager

analyst

sem manager

account manager

Merkle, Inc.

Merkle is a good place for new graduates who are eager to learn, don’t mind working long hours and also need visa sponsorship. 
Merkle used to be good with promoting employees based on performance but this process has slowed down. 

Merkle's HR has been the best I've seen in terms of benefits explanation and visa sponsoring.

Merkle allows high performance employees to work from home. Also, dependent on the manager, there could be a lot of work hour flexibility.

Merkle's management team does not think in employee's shoes and all they care about is getting work done. Hence they tend to throw out expectations that are too aggressive or even unrealistic and they push employees too hard that could very well frustrate employees. 

Merkle is very aggressive with selling. However, due to lack of evaluation of challenges of projects by the sales team, it usually ends up with terrible project planning such as unreasonable expectations and timelines. This in turns leads to tremendous pressure on the analytics team who does the actual work. This issue is particularly severe with big innovative projects. As a result, keeping pushing back deadlines with the clients is common. In the mean time, there is a lot of politics among the teams which is definitely not good for projects that are already struggling.

Merkle has been trying to heavily outsource advanced analytics jobs to offshore to contain cost. However, due to shortage of exceptional offshore employees caused by low pay, the offshore team needs a lot of supervision from the US team. As a result, a lot of US employees have to constantly work closely with the offshore team outside regular work hours, i.e. either very early in the morning or late at night. This has burned out and driven away a lot of excellent employees. Therefore, Merke is definitely lot an ideal place for people who want to have normal family life.

They terminate people right to left for unknown policies that were not mentioned in the training. Literally my second week at Merkle my manager was fired. The training was immediately getting pushed into the job field, I am guessing it was meant to be a hands on experience. The only issue with that is errors can also get you terminated which was ridiculous. I learned that factor through training later in my employment for Quality Control analysis. Some employees love the place some had a very hard time with working at Merkle. This review is specifically for the Merkle in Hagerstown Maryland. If you could not stay the mandatory 10 hours you were getting marked up. Some people there had emergencies and children and still were marked up for leaving. They had a system called " seven occurrences"  you only can get seven mark-ups and you were terminated. the bad thing is they do not tell you when they were giving you occurrences and if they did it was normally when you had two left. The system would have worked out well if occurrences were for reasons that were insubordinate toward the policy. However it was not, you came in a minute late , half a occurrence, came in a minute late from lunch which was only 30 minutes you were eligible to receive a full occurrence. Had to leave early no matter how severe the complications were you would receive an occurrence. You get too many errors when typing in data you got an occurrence, you were not allowed to get errors and if you did it literally could only be one or two mistakes. In that case I did not understand the job of the Quality Control if errors could not be corrected. Merkle literally did not have any empathy for their employees whatsoever. I watched a man who worked for Merkle over 12 years get terminated. I worked there almost a year and was training for a higher position and they still terminated me over occurrences. In my opinion and this is not because I was terminated this place was terrible! and at worst unjust. I pray that the standards and policy has changed for the sake of the employees.

At the time of writing we are deep into year 2 of essentially no employees receiving any promotions. The company is still patting themselves on the back because over a year ago they offered an "inflation busting" raise of approximately 2% for all employees. By the way, inflation at that time was closer to 9%. 

The company will make you sit through dozens of hours of large scale meetings and "town halls" where higher management talks about how great everyone at the president or C-level is amazing and everyone below that level is trash who isn't making enough money for the company.

When you aren't in pointless meetings you can expect unmanageable workloads and overly needy clients. Turnover is high and the company refuses to replace the people who leave so when someone on your team leaves for a job where they receive a base level of human respect, you can expect to do the work for multiple people with no expectation of a raise or promotion. Enjoy the meat grinder!

What is the best part of working at the company?
They will buy your company and then you will work for them 

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
When your company goes from an independent company with growth and opportunity to a shell of a company that exists partially within Merkle and partially outside of it, leaving Merkle to steal the company’s profiles while saddling what remains of your company with any losses. 

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
Garbage. “Garbage” again to hit the minimum 30 characters For this question.  

What is a typical day like for you at the company?
9am meetings that could be an email, constant check-in meetings asking why projects that are typically underfunded and understaffed are under performing while you see a constant flow of people being let go and replaced with overseas contractors.

What is the best part of working at the company?
Basically a steady job. Some interesting projects. 

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
Clients often involve outside consultants to oversee and critique work provided to client. Their advice and corrective actions are rarely shared in a timely fashion so we are embarrassed in status meetings with little recourse to mitigate issues. 

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
Very tribal. Client support teams rarely work together. Remote teams and outsourced services are too independent to efficiently respond to client special requests and issues. 

What is a typical day like for you at the company?
Too many ineffective meetings. Limited communication from management to project teams. Limited views of individual responsibilities and deliverables. Inefficient and outdated documentation.

Overall, this company has a good culture and almost all of the people working there are smart, driven individuals that care about the work. The pay, however, is lower than you will find at other similar companies. This is a great training ground for most people as you get exposure to client management and analytics quickly. It is also great to be able to work from home when you need to, although I've seen this extended to managers working from home which could be problematic, depending on the manager.

As part of the media department at Merkle there was a high workload as we were growing very quickly. While there was the right database structure for the Paid Search team to access their information to perform analytics, this is not in place for the media team, which led to a lot of inefficiency.
.

What is the best part of working at the company?
 The company has a very generous holiday and vacation policy. Several roles have the ability to work autonomously and collaborate as needed with different team members or agencies. The company is mostly forward thinking with room for individual contribution for innovation.

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
Some retained work is not always well defined, leaving consultants open to scope creep with limited recourse. Leadership and systems are disjointed across agencies causing outages and confusion on joint work. Layoffs and re-orgs expose operational outages and opportunities got better change management.

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
Collaborative, supportive but high stress towards billability.

The company is great. I have an awesome manager and the department is a really great place to work; however, other departments have a high turnover rate due to low pay, mundane and repetitive tasks, and strict security policies. Due to the nature of the company's work, the security policies are much needed, but the young generation with smartphones and poor work ethics have a hard time grasping this concept. 

Overall, the company could pay a bit more in the hourly wages. At least another dollar or two would result in being able to retain employees and decrease the turnover rate, which would lead to higher profits (less training, less orientations, etc). 

But if you can get into a non-production department/position, it's a fantastic place to work.

What is the best part of working at the company?
Having to put up with the constant rambling of an obnoxious, barely literate, very flamboyant "content squad leader" on a daily basis. Dealing with verbal abuse, slander and libel. 

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
Working insanely long hours with zero recognition, and dealing with the constant mouthing-off from a flamboyantly obnoxious "content squad leader" each day.

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
Very septic: Everyone only cares about their own pathetic careers, and management is clueless and impotent. 

What is a typical day like for you at the company?
Working long hours for minimal pay and zero recognition. Putting up with verbal abuse, slander and libel from the flamboyantly obnoxious "content squad leader" and having no way to combat it.

Most of the people are very nice.  However, it is a demeaning place to work.  I was there for over a year - still made minimum wage even though I was faster and more diligent than most of the people around me.  They don't care how hard you work - they are not going to pay you any more than the next person.  You would think they would reward you for hard work with at least slight pay raises every few months.  It is all about how many warm bodies they can have for the least amount of wages - they will hire anybody, as long as they are willing to work for minimum wage.  It is OK for beginners and young people starting out, but if you stay for too long it will become embarrassing and depressing.  Some people there end up looking like the walking dead.  It is truly Hagerstown's sweat shop. 

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Media planner 4 salaries reported	$56,750 per year
Analytics manager 10 salaries reported	$114,296 per year
Analyst 4 salaries reported	$60,252 per year
Sem manager 6 salaries reported	$78,733 per year
Account manager 1 salary reported	$89,200 per year

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