This may well be the longest Glassdoor review you have ever read. I'll start by asking you a question. If this is such a great company to work for as they say, why are there are clauses in the employment contracts to try and discourage you from speaking the truth.
The culture is extremely toxic and I've known people who have gone to the effort of having moved from abroad to quit within a year to get away from the atmosphere. Management can be extremely incompetent and pedantic and will blame others for projects going wrong rather than looking at themselves and improving their own abilities. You won't be left alone and will be hounded constantly. People have been known to receive emails at nine o'clock in the evening (or later) and then receive chasers at half nine in the morning as to why the thing they requested late the previous evening hasn't been done. If you are lucky enough to be allowed time off, you are often chased while on holiday, meaning you never get a proper break. The bereavement policy is an insult and when my family member died the policy itself was an atrocity (I had to take unpaid leave, apparently there's a hierarchy to what family members you can grieve for?). When I requested this unpaid leave, I had a manager debate with me how much time I could have off because there was work they wanted me to do (despite my relative having died two days previously).
The business seems to go through cycles where turnover hits tens of percent and there will be no sign of any hiring. This puts much more stress on the staff that remain and can cause a vicious cycle of continuous resignations which damages morale. Hours are long enough anyway (often because of ridiculously pedantic review notes in the name of "audit quality", for example, changing the type of tickmark you have chosen to use in a workbook, I'm not joking I actually had that)
Associates are treated especially badly. If you're unlucky enough to be placed in a regional office you will be pressured at certain times of the year to give up your weekends to go and do stock counts. Often travelling many miles to get there, without pay or time in lieu, and the management will have the nerve to aggressively question you over the expenses you file or the route you took.
You will rarely be thanked. Sometimes you could have worked until late and the first question in the morning will be "why isn't xyz done". Or you'll get some negative feedback about your "engagement metrics". You may get the odd team meal sometimes which is nice, and away jobs can be fun as well. These are rarities however in somewhere that should be a nice place to work.
Pay for the work you do is disgraceful. The school leaver program is particularly a joke (and I'm saying this as someone who was a grad). £17k or whatever the starting salary is for a first year school leaver who may sometimes work 60 hours a week is derisory. A first year grad probably gets £21-22k these days but the school leaver and the first year grad will be expected to do the exact same work.
Management are tone deaf. During Covid there was such uncertainty that they wouldn't be able to give a base pay rise, however the business was doing well enough that they could promote record of numbers of partners (check press releases, that's my evidence). The two don't quite stack up. Perhaps there was a business reason for this, but it was never explained and if it had been I think people would be much more understanding.
Overall, if you're in the middle of your career - avoid at all costs. For anyone at the start, it's more complicated and big 4 is known to be a tough place. Tough is fine, however toxic should be unacceptable in this day and age. As long as people work there and continue to feed the beast though, working conditions will not change.
If you do decide to work here that's fine it can do a lot of good for your career (just because of the name rather than anything else). But at least know what you're signing yourself in for.
Bear in mind I have actually had to tone this review down, but the more people speak up about the conditions people at the big 4 face sometimes and it's time others do the same. Perhaps this was just my experience and other offices are fine (I've left my office blank for privacy reasons) but that's something I can never know as it's unlikely I would return to working with this firm.
To end this essay, I'll say that all employees deserve to be treated with respect and dignity at all times unconditionally. This culture of "we all did our time to get our qualification/management position, so you should too" is a 19th century approach to work and has to stop.
