Pros
Hanover is a good place for two types of people: those who need a job fast and young people straight out of college. If you’re an okay writer in need of a paycheck, you can tolerate work at Hanover until you find a real job. If you’re a recent grad, you can actually do pretty well for yourself, as the high turnover rate forces the company to promote people quickly. In general, you can learn a lot at Hanover – but NOT because they will actively teach you anything valuable. Beyond basic introductory training, the professional development is pretty shoddy. However, the tight deadlines and unrealistic expectations will force you to find a way to develop your project management skills.
Cons
Hanover is a mid-size firm with the sophistication of a startup and the bureaucracy of a large corporation. The firm is run by inexperienced people who know far more about sales than about research. As a result, product quality is all over the place (basically as good or bad as the researcher assigned to it). Upper management seemingly has little interest in hiring or retaining people with expertise in research. There is no downward communication at Hanover. Every few months or so, the executive team will announce some new effort to communicate – a “monthly” email that comes out once and never again, a “quarterly” newsletter that comes out once and never again, a promise that sometime soon there will be an email about something (though that email never comes either). The lack of transparency contributes to a fair amount of paranoia and rumor-spreading. Also, the fact that they deny that there is a communication problem (or a turnover problem, or a product quality problem…) will make you feel like a crazy person. I could write for pages about all the ways that Hanover is poorly run from a business standpoint. Suffice it to say that if you have an MBA, if you’ve ever worked for another company, or if you’ve seen more than three episodes of Shark Tank, you will be taken aback by the level of mismanagement and lack of professionalism.
