Vault’s Verdict

Teneo offers a highly engaging work environment with a strong emphasis on culture, development opportunities, and compensation. Insiders love the variety of interesting projects across industries, providing valuable exposure and learning opportunities—all of which leads to rapid career development.

On a day-to-day basis, the firm’s culture is both flexible and supportive, contributing to a positive overall experience where consultants feel comfortable bringing their true selves to work. While the firm’s boutique status and lower brand recognition may be an issue for those seeking to do a couple of years before leaving for an industry position, the firm may well have enough opportunities and positive cultural aspects to ensure that you’ll want to stick around for the long haul.

Employee Reviews

Firm Culture

• “Competitive work-life balance, focus on minimizing hours.”
• “Diverse projects with interesting clients with intellectually challenging work.”
• “Good people, fun culture, excellent work.”
• “Top-tier management consulting work without the aggressive culture of MBB.”
• “We have worked very hard to maintain a boutique feel, even as Teneo the corporate entity grows. Despite our rapid growth, everyone in the firm still knows each other, enabling both strong working relationships and friendships to get built across grades.”

Quality of Life

• “Flexible working. No face time culture.”
• “Good work-life balance for consulting.”
• “Sometimes have to work late.”
• “Very reasonable hours and high respect for WLB.”
• “We have a very strong culture, with everyone from the newest hires to our CEO actively involved in various initiatives to enrich our team’s lives. From regular workload tracking to avoid anyone getting over-burdened, to a thriving set of formal and informal groups (from many active ERGs to our book club, sports teams, and annual trips away), we are about as broad in how we try to make consulting a job for anyone, for as long as they want it, as any firm in the UK.”

Career Development

• “6-month promotion policy. Active role of staffer to allocate based on preference and career development points.”
• “Excellent bi-annual promotion process, which takes a democratic approach across all members of the leadership team to eliminate bias.”
• “Highly meritocratic and transparent, comprehensive training.”
• “Our twice-yearly promotion cycle, and opportunity for high-performers to skip grades mean we offer about the fastest progression in the industry.”
• “You can progress very quickly. Can be stressful if you don’t keep progressing.”

Compensation

• “Best: salary strong (though I wonder if a bit weaker relative to market at Director level). Worst: poor pension.”
• “I am very happy with the compensation and pay.”
• “MBB pay more, I think.”
• “Transparent salary ladder, which is regularly reviewed / assessed against the market.”
• “We pay pretty fairly for the market, especially given our hours are markedly lower than most of our peers.”

Community Engagement

• “High focus on DE&I with a broad spectrum of initiatives.”
• “It could do with more international people (non-British native).”
• “Lots of activity focused on women and ethnicity. No focus on other categories, which are very underrepresented.”
• “There is a DEI working group who try to promote diversity, especially for minor ethnicity and gender, but not very visible effort for LGBTQ and disabilities. (Disabilities come in different forms and not always visible, and not everyone within the firm acknowledges and accommodates that).”
• “We have invested substantial time and effort into DE&I, especially in the last three years.”

Business Outlook

• “Growing very quickly and not massively impacted by the economy.”
• “Solid growth path and strong leadership.”
• “We consistently outperform other consultancies in terms of revenue growth in recent years and are sold out when I’m hearing of other consultancies delaying graduate starters etc.”
• “We’ve continued to grow this year despite the challenging environment.”

Hiring Process

• “Feedback is excellent during the process, assigned a coach (part of the SMT) to give feedback after the first round and talk through the second round.”
• “Good and quick process. Ideal candidate is smart, active learner, able to structure and communicate your thinking.”
• “The same as any top tier consulting firms.”
• “We are looking for highly intelligent, driven individuals. We place no value on previous experience or ‘polish’, but rather the ability to take unfamiliar problems and work through them.”

Interview Questions

• “Candidates must complete three case studies over two rounds.”
• “‘Data dump’ questions in which candidates must take in a large amount of data and deduce the key themes and arguments to present to an interviewer.”
• “Focus on case study interview format.”
• “Market sizing and case.”
• “Typical consulting fit/case questions.”