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).
