Pros
The people in my office were very nice including my manager. No micromanagement at all, but that’s only because there was virtually no management help at all. The only other good thing about this place is that no matter how bad you are they don’t fire you until it’s been 6 months. If you really need a job or just want to collect a paycheck until you find a better job you can coast here until you find something better. I’ve seen people who wouldn’t last a week other places stay on for over a year without making any sales.
Cons
Dave Schaefer needs to go. He’s a control freak dictating things like sales which he has no real knowledge or experience with. This has led to an environment where the only people who make a sale are people who cheat the system. The cheating is rampant, and you’ll keep hearing how there’s many leads out there while 99% of the leads are garbage they want RAMs to sort through. If you can’t make a sale within 60 days of being given a lead the lead will be taken from you and be given to another rep for 60 days. Because of this most of the offices I would reach out to would say they will never work with Cogent because they had been hit up by so many reps. The training at Cogent is also really poor and they practically hire anybody. Reps have bombarded leads with really bad outreach for years which has done damage that can never be reversed. Many times I couldn’t even email an office because they blocked all emails from Cogent and I can’t blame them. Other than this being a terrible place to learn sales or make any commission whatsoever the work from home policy is ridiculous. This job could easily be done from home but Dave Schaefer owns office buildings and leases that space to Cogent so he’s cannibalizing off his own company to fill his pockets which is the real reason why he makes employees go into the office. Every two weeks Dave does a biweekly call and this issue is brought up and he gives the same canned vague answer. This company is also kind of scammy because they make it sound like a full time job but really you find out at the end that you’re being hired hourly and will be made to work 9 hours a day. They don’t give off for holidays like MLK day, Veterans Day, Presidents’ Day, and more. They say it’s for “flexibility” but really it’s just a way to make you use PTO to get off days that you wouldn’t want to work anyways because all your potential customers will have off. Dave is so controlling that despite this being a global company he calls the shots on whether offices open or close because of inclement weather. He’ll say it’s HR but really it’s Dave telling them what to say or do. We had 4-5 inches of snow and barely anyone could make it to the office but because of Dave the office was not closed and everyone had to take PTO. Even tenured employees recognize everything wrong with this place starts at the top. I’d never work here again unless I had no other options or until Dave leaves and a new CEO cleans the place up.