Only a shadow of glory past
Gut am Arbeitgeber finde ich
There are still some great and engaged people left. Listen to us.
Schlecht am Arbeitgeber finde ich
Constant decline since 2017.
Weak, distracted leadership.
Not living up to our core values.
Verbesserungsvorschläge
Take the culture problem serious. The lack of female leaders is embarrising. Don`t accept bullish male behaviour, especially by management consultants and leadership.
Arbeitsatmosphäre
Sapient puts a lot of dedication into hiring competent people. Under the right project conditions you will likely have a great time. Though, especially in the last 18 months these conditions have worsened. Everybody considering to join Sapient is advised to doublecheck, if working here is the right decision.
Sapient struggles with two build-in flaws of their current holding structure and strategy.
1.) Important decisons for german locations are made in the US, UK, by the Publicis holding in Paris or by industry team leads mostly outside Germany. E.g. decisions for promotions, salary increases are highly depending of business success in other regions, meaning that you basically can hardly influence any of your own career progress.
2.) Sapient hired a number of management consultants into leadership roles. While surely competent, they represent an archetype of an oldfashioned big5 consultant, who struggles with flat hierarchies, constructive feedback and a diverse workforce.
This has made a lot of people leave, especially younger talents, who would no longer tolerate an often toxic climate of pressure, lack of appreciative mentorship and unclear outlook at career progress.
Kommunikation
Structure and decision-making at Sapient is complex, given our global structure. Leadership communication appears often intransparent, impotent and avoiding the elephant in the room. Many crucial decisions (promotions, boni, budgets etc.) are constantly postponed. When many people where sacked this summer, the communication was embarrassing: people disappeared without explanation, no reasons given who had to go and why, the sudden loss even of leadership members was kept under the wraps and nothing was done to give those people a proper goodbye. It`s understandable that this is a tense year of crisis but I would expect our group of leaders to be more professional - especially in tough times.
Kollegenzusammenhalt
In contrast to a long prosperous upspring in the years 2012-2017 the spirit of trust, community and openness has suffered. Ironically, leadership is often no longer a positive example for Sapient`s famous core values. Especially between management consultants, industry leads and people doing the work on the ground, the tonality has changed and became more top-down, aggressive, even desperate. It also seems that recent structural shifts towards international siloed industry-teams have created more unfairness and more internal competition. It does definitely not feel like a team anymore.
Work-Life-Balance
Depending on account and team, you can enjoy a well organized project including healthy working hours. You should always plan some extra hours on top, as most of Sapients internal systems are highly bureaucratic and technically outdated and require a high level of manual input and tolerance for frustration.
Vorgesetztenverhalten
While Sapient as a whole is still a capable organisation with strong expertise, current leadership in Germany is a problem. On the one side you have people with 10-20 years of Sapient history who have not seen any other environment since years. Their willingness to accept even the most ridiculous flaws of the organization as set-in-stone, perfect and „thats the way we do things here“ keeps Sapient Germany from evolving. Many veterans still see Sapient as a market leader and role model for the competition. Business reality tells a different story. Opinions challenging the status-quo have a short shelf life. Turfs need to be protected and sunken costs need to be saved. Lots of bitching but little ambition to act and take personal risks. Having a career at Sapient means not creating a fuzz and accepting things as they are. On the other side you have hyped saviours hired from competitors to close severe gaps in Sapients skillset or client access. Those people need to prove their value in short time and usually have 1-2 years to make it or fluctuate back into the job market. This mixture can be toxic and reinforces the already overly political modus operandi. If you like that - welcome!
Interessante Aufgaben
Applicants need to definitly double-check in which specific projects they will really work. You could join one of the bigger account teams and have a strong learning curve, but you might also end-up in constant pitching and sales work.
Most of the current project work is staff augmentation supporting internal client teams but with all the hassle of negotiating your work to your client`s internal clients while forced to meet Sapient`s internal margin targets. Other Publicis agencies like Pixelpark seem to do much more creative and cutting edge work.
So far, emphasizing consulting work has not brought Sapient the desired strategic outcome. Instead Sapient neglected catching up with modern delivery methods. While consultancies have invested in creative, content and tech, Sapient is still heavily waterfall-oriented and struggles with basic agile set-ups. Most of the leadership team has neither hands-on experience in agile project delivery nor a true understanding of how to apply data in design or how to measure impact of their suggested solutions. This create a huge dissonance between the pressure put on teams to meet targets and ambitions and the ability to deliver great work.
Gleichberechtigung
The culture and diversity problem is severe. While other companies in the market successfully hired, developed and promoted female leadership (DDB, Metadesign, S&F, JvM, Ogilvy, KolleRebbe, Diconium...), Sapient has little to none top-level or even mid-level female leadership in place, especially in their most important practises such as technology, product, creative and strategy. Female staff mostly appears in people roles or administration. Constant promotion freezes and a promotion application process that is overly critical and demanding towards existing workforce has made many ambitious and capable people go or give up in frustration. But foremost, Sapient has not managed to change a culture that clearly favours the traditional male breadwinner with no kids or „supportive“ wife at home. Before Covid19, remote work was a no-go and leadership actively campaigned against it. Sadly "manly" locker-room talk, jokes about minorities and mental health was not only tolerated but exemplified by leadership over years. Female talent was taught to "learn to put the fist on the table“ and to mimic successful male behaviours in order to meet the glorified „cultural fit“ for leadership roles.
Umgang mit älteren Kollegen
Sapient shows no ageism but struggles to cater to challenged life situations. Sapient`s ideal is the constanly available, travel-ready consultant who has no problem with sitting on a clients lap during the week. No wonder, there are only very few working mothers or people taking care of family members in client facing roles.
Arbeitsbedingungen
There are very limited local budgets for training or equipment. Cost pressure is high, so exact work gear specifications should be negotiated in detail while interviewing with Sapient. Before Covid you could easily end up with a laptop 8 years old. Now, after having got rid of a number of employees, the availability of contemporary laptops is no longer a problem. Local IT is outsourced but competent if available. Perks and benefits are below standard compared to competition.
Umwelt-/Sozialbewusstsein
Sapient works for any kind of client, regardless of their negative impact on the world. Clients in the mining business, tobacco or banks still investing in fossil energy are no ethical problem for Sapient.
Gehalt/Sozialleistungen
Sapient pays well, especially in management consulting where salary can be much higher than in any other teams. Applicants are advised to not put to much hope on boni and other perks. To put it mildly, in the recent past these variable salary parts have become less influenceable by employees and vulnerable to political decisions outside the german organization.
Image
Sapient suffers from little to none investments for their german brand. Which is sad, because some people do solid work in 1-2 accounts that could be worth to be told in the market. In comparison to other players in the german market, there are no public talks, conferences, meet-ups etc organized for employees to showcase their work and build a professional footprint in the market
Karriere/Weiterbildung
Career and personal growth is difficult at Sapient. Training budgets mostly are determined outside Germany and very low per capita. External trainings are extremely rare. Career progress is slow and difficult to own at Sapient, mostly because you need to build a strong network of supporters first and common rule is not to promote before having been in a role for at least a couple of years. Sapient rewards loyalty but not necessarily capability.