IRI exemplifies why America's middle class is shrinking
Pros
Paychecks arrive on time Work from home Some good coworkers Good name to have on a resume Good exposure to clients Decent work-life balance at times
Cons
Lots of the reviews here seem suspect with job titles that I have never seen in 10+ years of working here. First off, IRI will send as many tasks to India as possible or bring people here to do the same jobs as Americans at a much lower rate of pay. Just look at the H1B filings. This company professionally gaslights and astroturfs their employees, so it would not be surprising if they were submitting fake reviews to try to boost the rating or make this seem like a better place to work. They have done a disservice to the "best places to work" award by being listed as one. My advice would be to ignore the short reviews and read the long ones. IRI has had several rounds of secret layoffs over the years. Job postings are full of buzzwords that are intended to make the company sound far more modern than the 15+ year old technology that underpins everything. The culture is poor and cutthroat. Teamwork is a charade because as soon as things get tough, people start pointing fingers and blaming others. Solid employees have been fired over one-time mistakes. The worst management offenders of the "blame others" often get promoted. Outright lying about technical problems or misrepresentation at best is the norm with clients and employees. Furthermore, there is a culture of "hide problems, pretend, and fix with duck tape" that results in things never getting fixed. When things go well, management takes the credit. When things go poorly, they blame their direct reports. There is a very high rate of employee turnover for a professional workplace for non-management. Employees have been continually asked to do more and more while compensation has declined. Pay is subpar compared to the CPG industry and getting worse. Cost of living increases are not guaranteed. In fact, management has arbitrarily determined that some employees were paid too much and capped their salaries. This was done for a lot of people at the start of the COVID pandemic. Cost of living increases the people who received them before capping did not keep up with inflation for years (IE 1.5%, 2%) and this was before the recent increase in inflation. IRI will do anything to avoid paying employees more, including lying to employees about the salary capping program and denying pay increases when employees move into a job with more responsibility. Multiple reasons were given for the capping program. Bonuses for the analyst level were eliminated several years ago. Similarly, job responsibility was significantly increased in the Client Insights organization when a layer of management was removed while the pay was not increased. Employees who received stock (which was 50% of bonuses for years) were completely screwed over when the company sold in 2017. The value of the company tripled, but the stock that employees were given as part of their bonus was worth 50% less. Employees had to agree to not sue the company as a condition of receiving the stock payment. The benefits are horrible. Health insurance is extremely expensive for what it is. It is so bad that a lot of places won't take it, or they reimburse providers so poorly that you'll have to pay out of pocket and what you pay out of pocket doesn't count against your deductible or out-of-pocket max. It used to be much better. The 401k fees are off-the-charts high with extremely limited options. It used to be much better. IRI went to unlimited PTO and the end result is that people are taking substantially less vacation time. At the same time, you are expected to self-cover during your vacation, so you never really get the time off.
