4. Essilor
Number of employees: 64,000
Big 100 revenue ranking: 14
Glassdoor rating: 3.3/5
57% would recommend to a friend.
Here’s what current and former employees have to say on Glassdoor:
“Pros: Changes every day; friendly environment; schedule time; vacation and PTO. Cons: Poor management; employee preference.” —Current optical lab technician
“Pros: Great benefits; room for advancement; original management was superb; product superb and sells itself. Cons: Lots of competition; too many new acquisitions; starting to compete against ourselves.” —Former system administrator
“Pros: Excellent benefits; cooperative team driven environment. Cons: Slow career progression; certain managers are too hands off.” —Current engineer
“Pros: A great fast paced environment that brings together a lot of smart and dedicated professionals; there are opportunities for growth and internal movement. Cons: The business is so complex that the right hand rarely knows what the left hand is doing; there is a lot of overlap in duties which results in blame games when things go south.” —Current employee
“Pros: Good pay; opportunity for promotion in some areas; friendly people; global opportunities available. Cons: Male-dominated management; work-life balance is a personal responsibility; industry is slow to adopt change; few holidays and vacation structure is dismal.” —Current employee
“Pros: Socially responsible company; nonprofit affiliate Essilor Vision Foundation contributes a significant amount of time and money to help those less fortunate; in IT, some strong decisions about technical direction have been made, but they haven’t really been in accordance with a well-defined, well-communicated strategy; strong individual contributors, from the support through director levels. Cons: Limited mobility in the IT realm; old guard generally not hostile, but neither are they welcoming; downsizing at a pretty rapid clip; CEO left the CIO position unfilled for 9 months, while multimillion dollar enterprise projects were underway; VPs left in charge (both business and IT) could not always come to agreement on how to actually deliver something, resulting in a waste of precious time and resources (and market advantage truth be told).” —Former employee
