A race to the bottom and a mass exodus. When I started, AlphaSights was a great company with a start-up vibe, positive culture, and strong goals. Now, it is a full boy’s club that is throwing any consideration for its people out of the window in hopes to save its business. As an Associate, your day is filled with redundant tasks and you are basically a glorified call center rep. At least, associates have uncapped pay (though targets are getting harder and harder).
As a manager, unless you help your team with their day-to-day tasks, it is a babysitting job. Managers “audit” their associates (aka micromanage) and gossip about them all day. I work hard to take work off my associates’ plates and look around and no managers are doing that. I mean, why should they as their pay is capped and high-performing associates actually make less as they become managers? Anyone who is a promising manager serves better getting a higher-paying job elsewhere.
It is a babysitting job as the talent gets worse and worse. The recruiting team is well-intentioned but they care a whole lot more about quantity over quality. Unqualified candidates pass each recruiting round (“thanks for the flag but let’s give them one more chance”) and get hired every quarter. Managers don’t get a full say (VPs do) but managers are the ones facing the consequences.
These shifts are going from bad to terrible under their leadership. At first a good idea, AlphaSights’ only internal promotions turned out to be a detriment. You have leadership who ONLY knows AlphaSights and couldn’t give you a comparison of what else was out there if they tried. Vice Presidents and SVPs are the biggest culprits here. Then you get the token woman who makes C-Suite who of course had to be an external hire because all C-Suite was white men until she came along— now it’s just white people. Then we get the CFO who joined without any announcement, probably due to his IPO experience and the not so secret plans there. Hire diversity, AlphaSights. Your decade-long “efforts” are pathetic.
It’s a race to the bottom as 90% of their employees are miserable, the firm is hiring worse and worse talent, advisors lie about their experience to get more consultations, and leadership blocks out any feedback from associates/managers. You tell your VP that people are unhappy, he ignores you, and 95% of Associates have “open to work” on LinkedIn and will leave as soon as they can. I can’t wait for leadership to look around in 2023 and have no one left. Also all of AlphaSights’ “new products” are straight up replications of GLG or Tegus— get a bit creative, will you?
You were once great, AlphaSights. Now, it’s a joke.
