Elsevier reviews

4.0

79% would recommend to a friend

(2,187 total reviews)

Kumsal Bayazit

90% approve of CEO

75% positive business outlook

Elsevier has an employee rating of 4.0 out of 5 stars, based on 2,187 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Elsevier employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Audiovisual y medios de comunicación industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

2K reviews
1.0
Mar 21, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The companies so huge, and everyone is so busy, that you could probably take a fortnight holiday and nobody would notice you were gone. That was about it. 2.

Cons

Was a very toxic place to work. I had warnings that it was, but went in with a "how bad can it be?" attitude. Really bad is the answer. I ended up getting forced to quit, because a vice president in a different division, who I knew from a previous job, found out I worked there, and put pressure on my current management to fire me. I ended up doing a GDPR request, after getting suspicious about what was going on - and found them plotting within e-mails, to force me out, and then lie about the reasoning. After leaving I took them to court, but they dragged things out, and tied me up in legal fees to the point where the payout wasns't going to be worth it.

3.0
Dec 11, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Everyone is really nice and helpful. People care about their work and want to improve. Lots of focus on diversity. You get a really big technology sandbox to play in. You can choose your level of involvement: dive into difficult problems, or coast. There's all sorts of products in different industries to work on. Lots of freedom for horizontal movement within the organization, and plenty of room to grow in your career. Internal promotions are common. Compensation isn't fantastic but it isn't terrible either. Benefits are okay. Pre-pandemic, a few office perks. Lots of internal resource groups, volunteering, development days, etc. Opportunity to work on something that matters to you. Currently tons of job vacancies to move into/between. Moving into lots of new markets so lots of opportunity for growth and to gain experience build something up from scratch. Great place for a first step in a career or to upskill or grow your career. Beginning to be more open to flexible work. Not forcing people to go into office during pandemic.

Cons

I think the word "disorganized" sums up the whole company. With the amount of profit they have you would think they would invest more in improving the organization, but it's the opposite. They reliably make obscene amounts of profit, so I guess there is no incentive to improve, as there is no need to work hard to compete or increase profit. Lots of things are wasteful, inefficient, duplicated, poorly communicated, confusing, disorganized. Often they can't staff needed positions or pay for needed services, seemingly because of bizarre internal accounting rules, and managers seem to twist into pretzels to maybe make a deal to get people they need to do critical work. Silos everywhere, reinventing-the-wheel everywhere. Training includes the bare minimum needed to protect the company/executives, but often people barely know how to do their jobs, and aren't taught to do them uniformly (virtually identical groups across departments do things very differently). Engineers don't get onboarded to the hundred-plus standards they are required to follow. It takes years to accomplish a menial improvement that a medium-sized company could probably do in a few weeks or months. Acquisitions are getting better, but are mostly inconsistent with no real effort to onboard thoroughly.l. IT is pitiful; wait weeks to get your laptop after you start, poor desktop management / software rollouts, they still do password rotations (?!), they don't do developer-specific support even though devs make up a large percentage of the employees. The company basically seems like a machine that prints money and buys companies without caring what the result is (they don't seem to have a plan for what to do with the companies they buy). Business units' divisions work against each other and C-level doesn't seem to care (or at least isn't stopping it). Products have virtually no consistency other than all using the same hosting provider and the same marketing logos/themes. Very little code re-use or collaboration. The products that do make money are mainly legacy tire-fires staffed by people with no interest or need to improve (it's making money, why fix it?). A lot is propped up by pockets of amazing but overworked, overstressed staff. People don't take vacation or improvement days because they're afraid they will be even more behind on work than before. A good amount of employees are unskilled, redundant. Lots of contractors, treated like second-class citizens even if they put in better or more work than full-time employees. When employees bring up concerns in town halls, management doesn't commit to specific improvement or change. Ideas are ignored unless submitted as a business case. Finding, storing, retrieving information is haphazard. I think someone read Conway's Law and decided to build a company around it. The best people seem to leave within a year or two out of frustration.

1.0
Mar 6, 2021

No work/ life balance and jobs moving overseas

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great people Opportunity to travel

Cons

Poor management Favoritism by management Jobs moving overseas Way to many job eliminations Lack of communication

avatar
Elsevier Response
5y
Thank you for your review. We're sorry to hear from you as a former employee that you didn't enjoy your time with us. Frankly, we are shocked to read these negative comments as these are not what our work culture and organization represent. We are all working together as we strive to create a work environment that respects individuals and their contributions. Diversity of people and ideas creates value for our customers. We are fully committed to creating a great, fair and equitable work environment for our people all over the world promoting and enabling equal opportunity, regardless of their gender, gender identity, national origin, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or age at every level in our organisation. We need the engagement of people from a wide range of backgrounds, experiences and ideas to achieve real innovation for our customers around the world. Please reach out to us so that we can find out more regarding your review. Feel free to send us an email at elseviergdrev@elsevier.com
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