An UNBELIEVABLE amount of turnover. In my first six months there, after my joining a 12 person team, 6 people departed the company, of which 4 were fired. This was on my team alone, and I'd estimate that out of 45 or so employees on the floor, there were 15 departures during this same time frame. This frequent turnover becomes one of the chief obstacles in client development. You will be assigned a set clients to work with and build your business (mostly existing clients that have a contract with the company). The problem is that so many people come and go via firing, the chances are good that the client you visit will have had several different reps in the last year alone (all of which left abruptly, I.e. fired, so there was no graceful transition). In introducing yourself, your presence is met with indifference and doubt because of the revolving door. After i had managed to build a relationship, several clients admitted to me that they had no interest in getting to know me since they (correctly) assumed that another rep would be doing this again relatively soon.
On the temp side, teams are split between recruiters and sales people. This presented another complication related to turnover. Frequently the sales teams would bring in large blocks of orders, or even just one job. Unfortunately, due to inexperience and turnover, there often wasn't enough available bandwidth to ensure every job was covered. In this case, jobs are prioritized based on a formula developed to determine which ones are most likely to result in a hiring, making it hard to establish new clients because they lack the previous examples of our candidate being hired. Lest I leave out another important factor in determining priority: the name of the sales person who owned a job (surprise surprise! Favoritism runs rampant).
Management is completely blinded by metrics. In addition to your run rate (revenue generated week/month) management is absorbed by two statistics: number of outbound business dials/calls made and the number of client visits made per week. There is an expected amount of each to be reached every week, no exceptions and the totals are broadcasted company wide first thing each Monday morning with your name listed next to it (every division included). In theory this is a fine tool to monitor associate activity, but it is also a business killer. Since management mandates that "X" number of client visits are made, the result is that associates are scheduling pointless meetings. These waste both the client's and your time and cause your client to end up resenting you. When faced with the choice of annoying a client or being reprimanded by your boss, associates most always choose option one (not completing the required dials and visits is the primary cause of firing at Kforce). During my time there, the sales side was structured so that each rep focused on calling/visiting a maximum of 5-7 different companies. If you are expected to make north of 300 dials and more than a dozen client visits each week, that doesn't leave room for much variety. As a result, there was frequent contact with the same decision makers in a short time frame.
I can't tell you how many times my client would say "why are you in my office again, you were here two weeks ago". Truth is, they were right. In the staffing industry the most important factor in getting business from a manager is whether or not they like you. I would have to assume you'd get very annoyed if you were trying to manage the day to day of your business and the rep from a staffing agency (many of these managers had not yet even bought from us) keeps trying to meet with you by calling you, sending you marketing email blasts, and often is just showing up at your office once a week (the old "I was here meeting with your coworker and figured I'd drop in", let's ignore the fact that you've not replied to me after I've called you fifteen times this week and sent five emails). Please be advised that these meetings were imposed upon clients who didn't have a current job they needed filled (since these job orders were taken on the phone). I was encouraged to sit in their office weekly for half an hour "catching up with them" and asking probing questions about their organization. My favorite were the managers who were too polite to say no or kick you out, I sort of grew to appreciate their exasperated expressions as they glanced at their watches.
Meetings were made just for the sake of making them. As a result, we frequently lost business from annoyed managers. This information was brought up repeatedly to management but always fell on deaf ears. So long as you met the expected call and visit number, none of this mattered.