Terrible company to work for!
Pros
The only pro to this "career opportunity" is the flexibility it provides. Aside from this nothing else going for it.
Cons
This is a terrible company to work for. You're pitched the idea that you're a "Financial Advisor" building a book a business. The job is essentially a insurance/403b salesmen. Before you even start you're required to pass two exams in order to obtain your Series 7 and Series 63 licenses. This process takes about 2 months of which you're not being compensated and you're actually required to pay for the courses, study material, etc out of pocket. You eventually get reimbursed if you pass and decide to continue further but if you're cash strapped this is tough to get through. Depending on what team you land you'll either be cold calling all day in hopes of scheduling a meeting to then bring on a senior manager on to help with the sales call. The other route is working with school district employees. You're assigned 2-3 school districts where you're responsible for walking around the halls attempting to schedule meetings. Many schools prohibit this and when you are allowed into a school most of the staff are either not interested or have already been sold the 403b retirement plan from a older "advisor". Equitable makes it as hard as possible for new hires to succeed. If you accept job offer you're on what they call "Pre-Contract". This means you need to sign up 15 clients to a 403b or make $3000 worth of product sales in order to move onto "Full Contract". During pre-contract you receive a $1k stipend per month for the first two months and nothing beyond that. You don't receive a company computer until you're on full contract which takes 3-6 months. So initially you need to figure it out on your own. If you eventually make it past the pre-contract stage then you're on "full contract". At this point your salary is either $24k/yr + 50% commission or you can do no salary and 100% commission. Given you're just starting off and it's tough to generate commission most people select having the safety net of the base salary with the 50% commission. Most people will make all in about $30k-$35k their first year which is terrible after all the work they've made you go through. Your manager is the Regional Vice President (RVP) which is a fancy way of saying a hiring manager trying to build a team of advisors. There's like 6 RVP in the Bellevue WA office alone. The RVP is compensated by how much commissions you generate (they also take a cut of your original commission if they help you close a sale) so they're in a way double dipping off your work. They are always trying to hire as many people as possible to build the base underneath them. The turnover rate is so high which also plays into them always needing to continue to hire new people. Most people leave within the first 1-2 years of making essentially minimum wage. Once you leave, Equitable has the ability to charge back commissions for an entire year after you leave so you many people end up owing money back. I had to pay $3k back after I had left the job for bogus reasons. They normally won't make any attempt to contact you to explain why you owe the money. Instead they'll just send you off to a collection agency to handle the payment collecting process. I wouldn't wish my worst enemy to work for this firm. I would say if you're interested in Wealth Management to look into RIA firms instead of these traditional wire house /broker dealer type of firms.
