C.H. Robinson reviews

at a desk basically all day. logistics is not the most exciting industry.

This place is a total disaster for most. Like other reviews have stated on this site, unless you are one of the "Chosen Ones" which basically means you are an attractive female or in some branches, religiously affiliated with certain organizations, you get zero support and very little handed down to you. You spend the first year to two years after training as an assistant to someone. They repeatedly proclaim that this person you are assisting is not "your boss" however, they are the only one you deal with on a day to day basis. While you are an assistant your manager only pops his head around once or twice a month to yap at you about not making enough sales calls of your own, then it's back to assisting someone. Now in some cases, being an assistant wasn't bad at all, some of the more senior reps are very helpful and encouraging for you to learn and to start making sales of your own. HOWEVER, there is zero motivation for them to do that. In reality, the reps you are assisting really don't want you to go into sales on your own because they will lose an assistant and then have to train a new person. When you do finally make it into sales on your own and you are relieved of your slave duties as an assistant, certain managers, mine included, required you to make an obscene amount of calls either per day or per month. Carrier reps in some branches had to make somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 to 100 calls per day, regardless of whether they had freight to move or not. So those carrier reps, instead of identifying viable business opportunities, are logging fake calls to carriers and to fake numbers simply so their numbers sheet would read 75 calls per day. On the customer side, managers would require new sales reps to make upwards of 60 introduction calls per month. Finding 60 separate companies that had viable business opportunities was next to impossible, therefore, every single customer sales rep is sitting there dialing fake numbers and then logging fake introduction calls. They are also going through the system and finding companies that have zero business opportunity and calling them, just so they can log an introduction call. If you manage to stick it out long enough, you actually can go onto commission and start to make a decent buck. However, once that happens, you start getting hit with every tiny fee corporate can slap down on you. There's a general joke around the customer side of Robinson saying we should be called "CH Robinson Bank for all" Basically, when a piece of freight is picked up, the invoice is created (not delivered, but picked up). Then, the customers terms are at the most 30 days from that moment to pay the bill. Most intelligent customers require paperwork signed to show delivery prior to paying their bill, which can take upwards of 2-3 weeks to obtain from a carrier. So it is not only feasible, but a regular occurrence for a customer to not receive a bill until that bill is already past due. This would not be an issue unless it negatively effected the customer rep... If the customer does not pay the bill within 45 days of the ship date, the customer rep starts getting charged interest on the past due bill, NOT THE CUSTOMER?!?!? There is virtually no punishment at all to the customer delaying the payment of their bills. Therefore, a majority of the customers at Robinson all have accounts that are well over 45 days due and therefore, every customer rep is losing $$$ directly to corporate. As an example, one rep I knew lost close to $13,000 in interest. His salary that year was $98,000. This was an incredible industry to get into back in the late ninties and even the early 2000's. However, in the last couple of years, especially with the recent economic downturn, there is an obnoxious amount of competition and robinson is unable to differentiate themselves from their competition. In the end, I was selling a product to people who already had better service from a smaller more personal company. Finally, for a company that claims that they have never had a large scale layoff, they are liars. They are very talented at hiding large scale layoffs by only laying off people from certain offices every month. In the Chicago office, in the course of three months at the beginning of 2009, they laid off close to 15% of their employees, half of which they cited reasons for dismissal in order to avoid paying unemployment. Turnover is ridiculously high, ask anyone that still works there and chances are, none of their friends they made when they started are still working there. Id say 50% are gone within 3 years. Bottom line, this is a large corporation and the chicago central office is simply a mill of unimportant individuals who work like ants on an ant farm while the large corporation gets rich. Even when one ant is able to rise up and meet with some success, they are few and far between and big brother corporation takes every chance they can to reach into their pocket.