Pros
Kin has a easily navigable system, hot leads, and an overall cool workplace culture. I see what they were going for, but ultimately it’s irrelevant because they missed the mark. My fellow teammates were some of the best and kindest people in the world; and they almost made it worth it.
Cons
A handful of managers were good people who wanted to help. The rest of them were suck-ups who were on a bad power trip, and made clocking in to work a lot like going to jail. The multitude of ways in which you are tracked throughout the day make it where you’re all but chained to your desk. They also mandate that you spend half the day in outbound calling, half the day in inbound calling, BUT they get to mandate EXACTLY when those times will be. There is 0 flexibility, and if, for instance, a customer you quoted calls you to bind a policy and you jump out of inbounds/outbounds to take that call, you WILL be pinged by your manager within 2-3 mins asking why your status is no longer set to IB/OB. They don’t account for call-back times, checking emails (of which there are tons all day everyday), going to use the restroom for 5 minutes—any of those things require you to set your status to “follow-up,” and to them, that = doing nothing. And God forbid if it happens at any point throughout the day at the “wrong time,” when they have you set to be on IB/OB. Such a rigid tightrope exists that it’s counter-productive. Life doesn’t happen on a rigid schedule—customers call to bind at unpredictable times, and they don’t know or care if you’re “supposed” to be on the outbound dialer. They used top sales reps and glorified them, gave them big new titles, and then tried to hang them out to dry the first time they sensed trouble ahead, were fine to unexpectedly lay off/wipe out dozens and dozens of sales reps who had been high achievers for longer than most of the reps they chose to keep on board (some of whom did not have such strong sales performance.) PTO is given and highlighted upon hiring, but what they don’t tell you is that if you take it—if you come down with a terrible bout of covid, for instance w/ 104 temp, full body aches and chills, etc. —your manager will 100% question you in your group huddle as to why you couldn’t just suck it up like she did when she had x (“I mean after all guys, we are working from HOME, so it’s not that hard to still be here when you’re sick.”) Micro-management is their only MO, and the tracking systems are your ankle bracelet. I have never been so miserable and walked on eggshells for so long at any job in my entire life, all while busting my rear and exceeding sales goals. Panic attacks were the norm among many of my teammates, from the weight of constant stress from being watched like a hawk on every move you made. Lastly, there are no direct phone lines for anyone on the sales side, nor is there any method of communication for employee-to-employee contact beyond Slack. So if you need to get a blocker removed on a policy, for example, that a lender and customer may be in the office waiting on docs for in order to close the next day, your ONLY option is to post this request there, and wait. Sometimes it’s done quickly, but most of the time, it took 30 minutes or more to have one single blocker lifted by mgrs. These are things that there should be a better system for, and there isn’t. Again, counter-productive. All of these are things my entire team was over-frustrated and burnt out on, on a daily basis. These frustrations were brought to our manager. Nothing was done, bc they think they know already the best path, and everything I saw indicated that ideas and even mere mentions of changes that needed to be made, were silenced. Not a job where they care anything about you as a person. I felt free when I was gone from here, and so glad to be in a better place now!
