Bankers Life reviews

I should have read more Glassdoor reviews before working for them, because a lot of what I experienced was in other reviews. Here is my experience: I graduated college in December and needed to find a job. I did not receive a job offer for a sales position from any of the top companies I applied for so I was still searching after a month. I saw an easy apply on LinkedIn for an insurance position at Bankers Life and figured I would apply since it was a sales position. I went in for an "interview" that week and the manager spoke to me about the position. It was less of an interview and more of a hype up session for Bankers Life. Showing me that top producers go to exotic places, make six figures, and have a work/life balance. I was concerned about the commission only pay, but I was assured that with the recent Graduate Agent program and other bonuses I would be fine. I was also told that Bankers pays for all of my leads and that there were "more leads than agents to follow up on." I was also told that during the two office days I would be making calls, but they were not cold calls since they would be people who had requested information or needed to know about Medicare. These were huge lies and I did not even began to realize the extent of how false the promises were until I was already working full time. After the interview I decided to pursue my Life/Health license, but kept the door open to other jobs. Nothing came up and after I passed the exam and received my license (3 weeks for the course/test and 3 weeks of waiting, Bankers pays you nothing to help you and all expenses are on you) I started working full time for Bankers. I was told I would be reimbursed for my expenses, but it was not always clear when that would happen. I soon realized it would not be until I was a successful new agent (3,000 agent performance credits and 9 applications in), I was also only going to be reimbursed for $200 when my expenses thus far had been closer to $500. My boss even told me she convinced her boss to reimburse me twice, but I never saw that money either. When I started to work full time for Bankers week by week I started to see through the false promises. The leads I was given were either bad numbers, already given to another agent before, low income, or 50 miles away. I had almost no success with the leads that were close to me. I set about 10 appointments in my time there, but few of them yielded any results. I went on appointments with my field trainer but they were also few and far between at times, most of them required a follow up appointment before we wrote business and for many we never made it to the follow up. We had entire days where everyone cancelled or rescheduled, which comes with the business but it happened a lot. The office barely had the basics and lacked a fridge and microwave. The Santa Barbara office was opened in March 2017 so I should have seen the red flag when there was only one new agent who was still there and he came in December 2017. I had to make close to 200 calls every phone day and it was definitely cold calling because most people were rude to me because they had been called before or asked me to take them off my list. Near the end of my 6 weeks working full time I was asked to start doing 40 door knocks a week, which meant I was to go around random neighborhoods and knock on doors to see if they needed any more insurance (again with little success). I looked for part time work while I was there to help out but the hours I was expected to commit at Bankers prevented me from finding anything. Even the one grad bonus I got was less than expected. My expected $500 bonus became $383 after money was taken out for errors and omission insurance and new agent holdback. I know these are to protect the agent and company but it is not advertised up front and makes it even harder to get by. In total I worked at Bankers Life for 6 weeks (how long I was appointed with them) and I do not think I even broke even after all of the expenses, plus gas, and they will not even pay for your first set of business cards (which took a long time to process). There are very successful agents at Bankers who are making top money, some branches have multiple people making 6 figures. The issue however is that Bankers Life is more concerned about highlighting their success stories than fixing the issues at the lower levels. They say that you will be successful if you work hard and that it will not be long until you are making good money. I worked hard for 6 weeks and when I struggled to pay rent for two months I decided enough was enough. Other insurance companies had reached out to me and showed me programs that involved small base salaries to start. Bankers Life has high turnover like any insurance company, but there was no indication to me that they want to fix that. They had no real model for me and I was just expected to call and door knock as many people as possible in hopes that I get lucky and find someone willing to buy insurance. I was never given realistic expectations and was misled at every turn. The fact that not a single negative review has an official response from Bankers Life shows that they know the problems and do not seek to fix them. If you are a college student who needs a job you are better off working at a coffee shop for a few months than wasting your time at Bankers Life. If you do not have months worth of money saved or are an experienced agent it is a risky gamble that will likely not pay off. I did not quit because I lacked the hustle or work ethic, I quit because I was lied to about the quality of tools I would be given to succeed. Because at the end of the day I was using my own laptop to keep track of the awful leads that led me nowhere. The 14 total appointments I went on in 6 weeks was pathetic. Bankers is great if you are successful, but you are nothing to them if you fail to make any sales off the little help you are given.