The training is virtually nonexistent, but you don’t really need it. The job itself is pretty simple, but getting customers/creating revenue isn’t. You will spend your time in sales cold-calling random companies until you get lucky enough to land customers and move freight. For most, this “luck” will never come.
You’ll spend your first 3 months working on a team, aka working to make revenue for someone else. This will train you in using the company’s software, but will not help you in sales at all. You’ll quickly learn the purpose of PLS hiring new classes is to make more revenue for their established AEs.
Of every ten employees, maybe 1 or 2 will stick around. This is just the nature of freight brokerage. You will constantly be told that success is just a matter of working hard (100 calls a day, etc.) but you’ll learn quickly that just isn’t true.
If you observe the people who get interviews/get hired here, it becomes clear that PLS doesn’t even pretend to recruit. They just hire anyone who is willing to work for them. This helps them (ensures there are bodies in the office to answer phones) but is probably the #1 reason that turnover is so high. If you don’t even try to hire smart people, you won’t have successful employees.
The lack of emphasis on recruiting means that the office is filled, to be completely honest, with morons. I’ve made some great friends there, but have also never seen so many genuinely unintelligent people working in one office. It astounds me how any of them make any money there. The fact that they do is just a testament to the inherently random nature of the freight brokerage industry.
The in-house software they use is outdated and extremely annoying. This is one of the first things you’ll notice.
Management won’t necessarily “turn” on you if you’re struggling with sales. Rather, they’ll just passively phase you out until you get fired. As I’ve mentioned, their belief that “hard work” is the key to success in brokerage is a complete joke, but it’s a delusion they’re so consumed by that your failure to manufacture success out of thin air will quickly annoy them.
Turnover is insanely high. The comparisons to a pyramid scheme aren’t entirely fair, because you do earn a salary. But the similarities are there. The cycle is essentially to hire employees, benefit from their customers/revenue, and then give those customers to someone else after the employee is let go. Rinse and repeat.
As I said, take this job if you desperately need one. If not, you can almost certainly find something better.
