AlphaSights reviews

The cons outweigh the pros. When having conversations with other people who had left AlphaSights you’d constantly hear: “I’m actually treated like an adult”, “I'm no longer disrespected by clients/colleagues”, “My quality of life is substantially higher”, and I can go on. It was heartbreaking to speak with INTERNS who were scared to the core of not “hitting the numbers”. AlphaSights does not advertise the Associate position accurately at all. I joined this company with the false pretension that it was going to be closer to consulting and true market research. FURTHER from the truth. This is a hard-core sales job which in reality is much more complicated and draining than regular a sales job because you’re dealing with humans day in and day out, you’re not selling a product, you’re selling a call with someone else and that requires a ton of annoying, deconstructive, and manual steps. Be prepared to be exhausted of harassing these experts all day to potentially meet unreasonable client expectations. Oh, and keep in mind if you don’t hit these goals in the first 6 months, you’re out without a second thought, and you’re not safe afterward either. And yes, you will work way more than “8-6 pm” and if you work at night or on a weekend, you’ll be publicly celebrated. Unfortunately, I spent hours at night manually reaching out to hundreds of experts because this company does not care enough to buy a CRM or automate mundane tasks. This brings me to the next point, the clients. Clients do not respect companies like AlphaSights, as much as they want to be seen as “thought partners”, they need to stop being delusional because they will always be treated like a service. The expert network industry is more fragmented by the minute, and AlphaSights probably has the highest prices in the market, clients simply want a fast result, which is why they’ll send the same project to 4-7 expert networks at the same time. Oh, and they won’t let you know when a specific segment of the project is fulfilled or when something isn’t needed anymore. Clients ghosting AlphaSights is entirely normalized. This means that at least 50% of your time is going to be wasted because again, clients don’t respect AS enough to even keep them updated with the project needs. Management won’t care about this though, because the second you complain you’re going to be complained about. I also found it so sad they treated and talked about clients as if they were this god-figure, and when one client was semi-nice to us, this was usually highlighted in a “win” which we all found hilarious. I think the culture is the worst part of all. It’s sad because I do believe that AlphaSights has a great service, and the potential to be a great place to work, but they simply don’t want to be. This is no big news but AlphaSights will only hire directly from universities which means all the managers, VPs, and so on, only have experience working at this company. As another comment here said, I think managers+ are in some sort of hypnosis experiment, because I always thought how crazy it was they didn’t seem to see all the wronging happening under their noses, or caused by them. Be prepared to get placed with a manager who’s at most 2 years older than you and will teach you nothing about real career growth, professional values, and deep development. They’ll quite literally only be there to check in with you multiple times a day to make sure you’re doing what you’re supposed to do and harass the experts more. It’s pretty sad to aspire to babysit recent grad kids as a next step in your career, but the main reason they do it is for a title change on LinkedIn and because “none of their friends is a manager at their age”. If you’re in AlphaSights currently, use them like they use you. Work on your interests, and your resume, and apply to jobs on the weekends. I promise you, it’s going to feel like a long process, but you’ll feel happiness and joy again. Don’t let them make you believe you’re not good enough just because you’re not hitting a certain unrealistic number. Frankly, all the people I know who’ve left AlphaSights, are way more intelligent and wise than the ones who stay there. And many of those who stayed there were just for the comfort of the known. I’m still so traumatized by everything I had to see happen in this company, when I got a new job the first feeling I had was fear it’d be like AlphaSights. I’m glad to share that’s far from the truth and it’s the best decision I’ve made in my life. I recovered my mental health, I don’t have rashes caused by stress anymore, and I now have the time and energy to spend quality time with my friends and family (many of these relationships were affected).

The Job: Incredibly monotonous and you learn nothing. 50% of your day consists of rescheduling phone calls between the client and expert, just for the client to eventually cancel the whole project or for the expert to yell at you over the phone. 20% goes towards writing unnecessarily long emails that go straight to these investment/consulting clients’ inbox archive. 30% of your time will be wasted on LinkedIn cold connecting/messaging with people, sending out aggressive reminder nudge emails to experts who clearly don’t want to consult, and waiting for the poorly designed AlphaSights portal to load. You will get rude responses from people (which is justified) and be forced to continue interacting with them to hit your quota of sourcing enough people for the project. There are so many easy ways that the job could be a lot more efficient if we just automated things like email taps or sending out mass emails. You will get bored really quickly, because it’s the same routine every day. You juggle 10-15 projects at once and it’s frustrating to see how poorly the clients treat you. They see AlphaSights as a disposable ENS among many other services, and often times they don’t reply to us for weeks or treat us like robots. There’s very little room for growth, you don’t learn anything that you can take to other jobs. Sure, once you get a little older you start working with clients and making google presentations inputting very basic data, but that’s the extent of any hard skills you’ll learn. It’s not a consulting job, it’s not market research, it’s at the core a glorified secretary job to help bankers/PE associates/consultants who do the actual work. Hiring: This company specifically hires young, easily manipulated fresh grads who have either played college sports, were in greek life, or are generally attractive females to lure in the experts (most of whom are usually male). Cant even begin to explain how many times these young females have to be hit on by men as part of their professional work. It’s a horrible tactic given that many candidates who actually do want the job are turned away because they don’t fit AlphaSights’ niche criteria. If you’re smart and want to do well in life, you won’t like this job. Training: None if the skills learned during this job can be transferable anywhere else. PD created hours and hours of lessons and programs to teach us the basic skills of how to talk to someone on the phone or write an email. Associates aren’t allowed to send their own client emails until 7+ months on the job, and this is written off as being very “typical” for all entry level positions at any job. Meanwhile you will see your peers at other companies with *their* entry level jobs taking on a lot more responsibility. Frankly, a lot of your peers will actually be the clients. This job doesn’t require a degree, it’s a job that anybody could do fairly easily as it doesn’t revolve around critical thinking. It’s nice that all associates are paired up with a trainer, but the company has an intense micromanagement issue. You can barely take a break for lunch, you’ll get questioned for taking 30min of personal time on your calendar, and overall your time is not respected. Don’t work here if you’re a self starter and have a lot of creative ideas. All associates start at the same place with same pay, there’s no room for advancement based on your actual skill or hard work. Salary, Hours, and Culture: Standard office hours are 8am-6pm, working hybrid M-W in office. There’s a toxic mindset that people who come at 8:01am or leave at 5:45pm will be frowned upon, and people who stay until 7:30-8pm are rewarded. People who work late nights or weekends are also rewarded for doing so, even when it was completely unnecessary. You’ll likely be working a 55-60 hour week for a barely livable wage. There will be projects or emails to deal with on Saturday night, and if you decline to take work in off-hours you’ll get called out. The base salary is 60k and the commission you get is all or nothing, and strongly depends on which team you get placed on with which clients. They say top performers can easily make 90k, and while some people might, it’s not whether you’re a top performer. The cards are not in your hands, it just all depends on the kind of client you have, what month it is, how many people are on your team, etc. Most people struggle with hitting their benchmark credits, and receive $0 in bonus commission for the month. They make it seem like it’s easy to hit the quotas when it’s not. The all-or-nothing model is ridiculous and really hurts the associate morale. You could be working your a** off all month at 60hrs and still not meet the quota. If you don’t like the idea of having a quota riding on your back every month and needing to be ultra competitive with your coworkers, this isn’t the place for you. It’s a very competitive environment. I would suggest a team based quota or profit sharing model instead.