Two main things to note from working here ~1 year: the nature of the industry and its resulting work, and management constantly shifting blame and fostering, consequently, very poor culture.
First, since this service is called “research” let’s clear things up. You, as an Associate (formerly dubbed “Research Analyst”) in the Connections department, are helping investors, consulting firms, PE firms, etc. with their “research.” In the last 10-20 years these clients have outsourced this process of recruiting and scheduling such “consultations.” Your work at the entry level and the next level as a client facing Project Manager/Client Associate, is following client instructions (often off-base) and sending expert profiles as fast as possible to the client before competitors. You will not be doing any value chain work, despite what Third Bridge interviews may lead you to believe, or internet research on the companies involved. The “research” you do on each project is listening to each Client Associate on what to plug into search engines for their respective projects and then getting spammed by 5-10 Client Associates sporadically about why nothing has come to fruition yet. Team Supervisors count this back and forth as “researching.” You will spend a lot of time (maybe 10% of your day) fending Client Associates off in these “check ins.” The rest (85-90%) is cold calling and repeated outreach to leads. Administrative duties like scheduling, negotiating, payment disputes, etc. fill maybe 5% of a day. Your job is to find people who have left sectors at the right times and used or sold relevant products. Most recruited experts won’t do a consultation. Ever. You have basically sold them a meeting (since they do it for little to no money) that is nowhere close to guaranteed. You are a middleman and luck is a huge factor. This is not a fun “consulting-lite” job. It is not a path into Private Equity or Investment Banking.
Second, management and culture. People tell supervisors what they want to hear and pass the hot potato along of why more consultations aren’t being scheduled. Often one or two Associates on each team are scapegoats who “fail” and “cause” the team to fall short of daily goals. These scapegoats will be told they should “think harder” about how to boost numbers, such as “waking up early to catch up on messages while lying in bed”, not leaving the office “on time so often” when it is busy (which is all the time, because the company is chronically short-staffed with below 50% retention if I had to guess), working on the weekends, etc. This can happen regardless of Associate performance towards official targets. People meeting 150%+ of their goals will be scolded too. There are endless consultations to sell. If you don’t deliver on every assigned project, supervisors think you must be having some issue. Then those scolded Associates are suddenly praised and “ready” to move onto a “better” role than the initial Associate work. They expect you to be more committed to working outside of “core hours” of 8:45-6:15 in the next role. Everything is micromanaged in both roles. Management tears you down, so they can build you back up. Management loves to play good cop bad cop in virtual meetings as part of this. Many people have cried because of this both in office and working remotely. This won’t be put in writing, so you have no record/proof of this sort of behavior. No one trusts one another. Associates will be told, “client associates have the right to not trust you” to work hard and/or correctly. The managers do not trust the company’s own training or official performance stats. In the first two positions it is a game of who knows what and what does it look like we did/are doing on each project to lessen daily supervisor criticism. People find their own ways to bend the rules. Supervisors pretend that no one cuts corners. So lay low and fake smile. HR defends such tactics and states they are “already working on that issue,” while dismissing whatever happens/happened. They will say “I’m sure we don’t know the full story” or “there must be more to it than that” or “we only want to hear constructive feedback.” They only care about how to best deny issues with their script. Before you know it, you are locked into this job chasing a shiny new title.
