A disclaimer before I roast: Most of these things are specific to the industry (AlphaSights' competitors have similar cons): 1) Repetitive and Dull: The role was sold as ringing up people and reaching out to experts across all industries to capture all the untapped knowledge out there. There will be days (or a week) where you don't speak to any relevant expert, and you'll spend 10 hours of your day stressed that nobody is replying to your outreaches despite your multiple attempts to chase them and cold call the experts. Most people had their headphones on and listened to podcasts while doing the mind-numbing tasks (which make up most of your day). 2) Luck: I could write a thesis about how luck and Performance at Expert Networks are intimately correlated (and I know that management will challenge this by saying top performers consistently perform well, so you be the judge). To keep it brief: your performance is dependent on your ability to connect two of the busiest people on earth (sometimes with a 5+ hour time zone difference) over a 1-hour phone call. Some clients are picky and will only speak to senior executives, which makes it much harder for you to reach them. If you manage to recruit a top executive and have gathered his/her availability for a call with your client, you should hope that your competitors didn't do it before you (Management will tell you that you need to be quicker here, but sometimes our competitors already have these experts as part of their network so they basically sent your client a profile within a few minutes). Assume you did schedule the call with your client, that doesn't really mean that they will show up (clients have either dropped or rescheduled roughly 10% of calls last minute). If you're still not convinced that this industry is mainly dependent on luck, imagine your client reaches out and asks to speak to X. You will cold call X, send X emails across every address you can find, text, leave a voice message, connect on LinkedIn, like X's posts on Instagram and Twitter, DM across all social media platforms, reach out to X's family, but to no avail. On other days, you'll send 1 outreach to a pool of 100 experts and have all 100 answer back - so, in a nutshell, you will need luck. 3) Poor Tech: For a company whose main mission is to connect two people over a phone call, AlphaSights has found a way to screw it up (you might think it's silly that we're in 2023 and we still can't connect 2 people over a phone call without facing any technical difficulty, but I faced that problem a dozen times each month, and anybody's morale plummeted whenever they had to experience such a stressful situation). 4) No WLB: Sometimes you might be asked to monitor calls late in the evening (and as you read above, they might fail and you might be out so you'll have to pull up your laptop/work phone to make sure your client gets their evening MNPI fix). You're told that you have the option to have someone from the US cover for you if it's late, but for anything before 10:00, I was told "it's only a few minutes." Aside from watching calls, which indeed only takes a few minutes, most people feel stressed and have worked outside of working hours (which, for our pay, is not worth it) to keep up with the sales target. 5) You don't really learn much about the industries you work in, and after being out for a few months, I can tell you that you'll forget most of the technical terms because you don't really need to learn them to perform well on the job. 6) Godlike Clients: AlphaSights is obsessed with their clients, and that is both a pro and a con. It is something they pride themselves on, and I think this sets them aside as a top-tier Expert Network, but lately, it's become toxic, and associates are fed up with the "client obsession." Some business units challenged clients whenever they were hard to work with, but again, that would depend on your luck of the draw, and at the end of the day, you're signing up for a Client Service role, so you should expect that going in. 7) Unethical: I am not sure any industry is ethical nowadays, but the hypocrisy of Expert Networks' compliance teams is so blatant that it is almost comical to hear them preaching about MNPI, as if what we do was legitimate. Only recently did they begin implementing more stringent regulations (essentially, some of what we used to do 1 year ago has become non-compliant, and that is all you need to know to realize that in another year or two or more, everything you're doing now might become non-compliant too). 8) Depressed Culture: People used to love the job and culture, but management realized that's no longer the case. People who used to stay after hours on a Friday night to grab a drink are now the first to leave whenever there's a company event. Nobody enjoys staying longer than they have to, and the elevators are packed at 6:30 sharp. If you've made it this far into my rant and are still considering applying, take 30 minutes to read other reviews here as I intently left out the points that everyone has repeatedly mentioned. Despite my paragraph, I owe AlphaSights a big thank you for an amazing experience. The quality of people is unmatched. It's unfortunate that most are driven out due to the nature of this industry.
