Pros
The company is experiencing drastic growth, as it currently operates in a niche market with no ceiling on growth. The global hedge fund due diligence is very profitable and that has reflected on the steady crop of new business that company has been able to bring in. Castle Hall prides itself on providing the highest quality of information achievable within their means to every client it has.
Cons
Castle Hall currently lacks strategic planning for the long-term, as I experienced first hand with its Halifax office. It projected hiring at least 50 new employees by the year 2016 (from a press release in 2010), though it currently has 6 entry level analysts manipulating and entering data in its platform. The company is currently top heavy, with a management team outnumbering subordinate employees. As an entry level employee, I engaged with several different superiors, each with a different set of standards for the same type of work. This caused great confusion and I doubted that the work I was entering in the system would be correct after countless reviews. There are currently two offices for Castle Hall, one in Montreal and one in Halifax. Each office engages in providing Castle Hall's clients with different services. Although this may be the case, each office still has a lot of cross-over with the workloads of each client and there is often little to no communication as to which office is providing what portion of the work. This had led to Castle Hall reaching out to entities like fund administrators and investment manager for the same information, etc. This results in internal conflict and each office instilling a lack of trust in the other. The company's online diligence platform has encountered numerous problems. These problems range from data bugs as simple as not being able to save information down in the system, to full blown productivity loss due to the platform not being accessible for hours at a time. Due diligence is not for everyone. This is the type of work that can be repetitive and boring at times, but in saying this, that it requires a high attention to detail and a willingness to use your brain. As I mentioned before, the company is top heavy which means micro-management is at an all time high. So, this work can become much more tedious and annoying when you have upper management employees demanding a variety of changes for such simple and standardized tasks, that in fact you as an analyst are much more familiar about than they are.