The Job: Incredibly monotonous and you learn nothing. 50% of your day consists of rescheduling phone calls between the client and expert, just for the client to eventually cancel the whole project or for the expert to yell at you over the phone. 20% goes towards writing unnecessarily long emails that go straight to these investment/consulting clients’ inbox archive. 30% of your time will be wasted on LinkedIn cold connecting/messaging with people, sending out aggressive reminder nudge emails to experts who clearly don’t want to consult, and waiting for the poorly designed AlphaSights portal to load. You will get rude responses from people (which is justified) and be forced to continue interacting with them to hit your quota of sourcing enough people for the project. There are so many easy ways that the job could be a lot more efficient if we just automated things like email taps or sending out mass emails.
You will get bored really quickly, because it’s the same routine every day. You juggle 10-15 projects at once and it’s frustrating to see how poorly the clients treat you. They see AlphaSights as a disposable ENS among many other services, and often times they don’t reply to us for weeks or treat us like robots. There’s very little room for growth, you don’t learn anything that you can take to other jobs. Sure, once you get a little older you start working with clients and making google presentations inputting very basic data, but that’s the extent of any hard skills you’ll learn. It’s not a consulting job, it’s not market research, it’s at the core a glorified secretary job to help bankers/PE associates/consultants who do the actual work.
Hiring: This company specifically hires young, easily manipulated fresh grads who have either played college sports, were in greek life, or are generally attractive females to lure in the experts (most of whom are usually male). Cant even begin to explain how many times these young females have to be hit on by men as part of their professional work. It’s a horrible tactic given that many candidates who actually do want the job are turned away because they don’t fit AlphaSights’ niche criteria. If you’re smart and want to do well in life, you won’t like this job.
Training: None if the skills learned during this job can be transferable anywhere else. PD created hours and hours of lessons and programs to teach us the basic skills of how to talk to someone on the phone or write an email. Associates aren’t allowed to send their own client emails until 7+ months on the job, and this is written off as being very “typical” for all entry level positions at any job. Meanwhile you will see your peers at other companies with *their* entry level jobs taking on a lot more responsibility. Frankly, a lot of your peers will actually be the clients.
This job doesn’t require a degree, it’s a job that anybody could do fairly easily as it doesn’t revolve around critical thinking. It’s nice that all associates are paired up with a trainer, but the company has an intense micromanagement issue. You can barely take a break for lunch, you’ll get questioned for taking 30min of personal time on your calendar, and overall your time is not respected.
Don’t work here if you’re a self starter and have a lot of creative ideas. All associates start at the same place with same pay, there’s no room for advancement based on your actual skill or hard work.
Salary, Hours, and Culture: Standard office hours are 8am-6pm, working hybrid M-W in office. There’s a toxic mindset that people who come at 8:01am or leave at 5:45pm will be frowned upon, and people who stay until 7:30-8pm are rewarded. People who work late nights or weekends are also rewarded for doing so, even when it was completely unnecessary. You’ll likely be working a 55-60 hour week for a barely livable wage. There will be projects or emails to deal with on Saturday night, and if you decline to take work in off-hours you’ll get called out.
The base salary is 60k and the commission you get is all or nothing, and strongly depends on which team you get placed on with which clients. They say top performers can easily make 90k, and while some people might, it’s not whether you’re a top performer. The cards are not in your hands, it just all depends on the kind of client you have, what month it is, how many people are on your team, etc. Most people struggle with hitting their benchmark credits, and receive $0 in bonus commission for the month. They make it seem like it’s easy to hit the quotas when it’s not. The all-or-nothing model is ridiculous and really hurts the associate morale. You could be working your a** off all month at 60hrs and still not meet the quota.
If you don’t like the idea of having a quota riding on your back every month and needing to be ultra competitive with your coworkers, this isn’t the place for you. It’s a very competitive environment. I would suggest a team based quota or profit sharing model instead.
