Buckle up.
The job changes as you progress up your targets. The first few months are nonstop recruiting (when I started this was called “Analyst”) and if you manage to hit a certain amount of key targets you then get promoted into a role which is best described as an outsourced personal assistant to your clients / a customer service role (this role was called “Client Associate”). I will begin by describing the first few months.
Your typical day as an analyst will involve a meeting around 9:00 or 9:30 with your team (some 5-10 people, a mix of “Analysts” and “Client Associates,” with a line manager). During the meeting, the Manager will go through everyone’s daily “capacity” aka amount of time available (to the minute); the “Analysts” will be asked to give a detailed breakdown of the amount of time they can offer up, until the whole 8 hours of the day is accounted for; this will be matched to the amount of “capacity” that is required by the client associates to help them on their projects. If no client associate from your team needs a “slot” (a certain amount of individual capacity, 30-60 minutes usually), your time as an analyst will be offered up first to the wider office, then to other offices worldwide. The culture with regards to your resources is one that in my view does not reward productivity: you will find yourself finishing tasks in less time, only to be “rewarded” by having to offer up whatever time you have left to other teams, doing more work and often taking longer due to the difficulty of adapting to another office or team’s needs. The tasks are fairly simple and do not vary much: as an analyst, you will be given a section of a “project” to work on, and you will have to find people on LinkedIn to add to the company database. Once you have added the relevant ones, you will cold call them, email them, making sure to write a note for each on the system so that your line manager can check that you are actually working (you are micromanaged and always looked at in a way that feels very 1984-ish). Once you have finished all of your allotted work for the day — and only then, no matter the hour — you get to go home. Rinse and repeat. You are evaluated on the amount of people, from the total that you add to the database and cold call, that end up speaking with your client associate’s client for a fee. You will not progress to client associate until you have delivered a given amount of these “successful” engagements for a number of consecutive months.
Once you do, your job changes completely. You will now be assigned a number of clients, and you will be their point of contact at basically any hour of the day (or night). You have to constantly monitor your email, because your manager is always in CC, and you need to respond to your client within 5 minutes. If you do not, no matter the reason, you are reprimanded. You will be micromanaged to the extent that if you do not respond to an email within let’s say 2 minutes, your manager will send you a message asking you to do so. Your day to day will consist of doing data entry in response to your client’s requests, and arranging calls for them with the people the analysts have found for you — or with people who are already on the company database. You will schedule calls and ask for availability, and perform all the tasks of a personal assistant (for let’s say 5-10 clients, each having some 2-10 people who use your services) and those of a customer service representative. You are once again measured against the amount of these calls you can facilitate. If you do not facilitate a given amount each quarter, you are let go — each time you successfully hit your target, it is raised by 20% or so. The company does this until either you leave, or are let go. The very few people who manage to sustain this for a few quarters get promoted to managers.
Some people genuinely thrive in this environment— I did not, and so I left. I did not give any personal opinions of the above, and will let the readers judge for themselves. I would only warn you that if you are not happy with what you see here, you won’t enjoy your time at the company. Unfortunately, nothing in this role gives any hard skills, or anything you can repurpose in the future.
Beware.
