Please read my story as outlined below.

I am not a salesman. The purpose for this web site is NOT to sell you supplemental benefits. This is my story of working for AFF LUCK. I have absolutely nothing to gain by making this web site available, I'm simply publishing it to spread the word about being a corporate recruiter for this Fortune 500 company. Please read on to learn about my personal experience at a local State Headquarters office.

I started working with AFF LUCK when I was 17. My manager was a cool white guy, age 27, short gelled-up hair and a professional demeanor with a sincere smile. For the sake of remaining anonymous, let's call him Mr. Duck. He didn't have that "sleezy car salesman" allure to him, and when he spoke you realized Mr. Duck knows his stuff. I was extremely excited about getting my first legit office job, especially given that it was by a #1-to-work-for company according to Money Magazine. My fancy title was "Recruiters Executive," which is Duck language for "Call people on resumes to invite them to group interviews for a commission-only sales job." In my experience freelancing for web masters over forum boards, I would imagine it's like hiring people to be your Clickbank affiliate... on a grand scale. I was the annoying guy who scavenges CareerBuilder, Monster, HotJobs, and other resume sites and calls you 25 times a day. I was one of dozens in the area.

Although these "recruits" would only be getting paid commission for whatever sales they bring in, my job had actual productivity standards and I was getting paid an hourly rate by one of the managers there. That's what made it worth my while. The reason for that is AFF LUCK's staff referral system, or like I just mentioned, "Recruit" system, which allows senior agents such as Mr. Duck to earn commission off of sales that people under them make. It's kind of like a legal pyramid scheme, except everyone actually profits. I was being paid by an entrepreneur who "happens" to offer AFF LUCK, basically; I wasn't being cut a paycheck from AFF LUCK, but from Mr. Duck aka my manager/supervisor/boss himself. My staying on task and blowing up the phones was his biggest priority, because I obviously wasn't being paid to sit on my lazy ass doing nothing. The way Mr. Duck explained it to me was, "In business, you only have two real assets: time, and money. If you can spend your time doing one thing and making more money than doing another, you might as well pay another person an hourly wage and keep the difference in profit." Sound advice, and it made sense - AFF LUCK is all about hard work. And it's this kind of on-point thinking that got it to where it is today.

So there I was, a newly hired 17 year old Recruiters Executive at a State Headquarters for AFF LUCK, the biggest supplemental benefits provider in the world. About 30 people worked in our office, and I know of at least 5 other offices around the state. Apparently, our state had more businesses coming in that AFF LUCK had agents to contact them, set appointments, and sell policies. It was in the company's interest to hire more people, and that's what these managers did - pay people out of their pocket to hire more salesmen (so that the manager gets a cut of their total dollar amount of sales, like the pyramid scheme that I mentioned before), while they went out to business owners to talk business. And AFF LUCK's agents are really smart about how they go about this process.

Recruiters Executives - myself included - phone people up about their resume on a paid resume search site (again, paying for access to these sites often cost thousands, and it was another expense on behalf of the managers there). These included sites like Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com, Jobing.com, Hotjobs.com, and a few other. The first four are most frequently targeted by other very aggressive recruiters such as myself. A typical phone call went like this:

Me: Hi, my name is Mr. John Doe, I'm a Recruiters Executive calling you in reference to your resume on [JOB SITE], my manager asked my to give you a ring. How are you today?
Recruit: Good
Me: I'm calling you from the AFF LUCK State Headquarters office, and we're currently trying to expand in the state here. My manager is hiring for an Accounts Executive and a Management position, and he would like me to schedule a preliminary interview for you. Do you have any availability this week or perhaps next week?
Recruit: Yeah, do you have mornings available?
Me: Let's make it Thursday at 9am, does that work?
Recruit: Sounds good. What's your address?
Me: Well, I was actually going to send you out a confirmation email. It will include our location along with a contact phone number to reach us at if you need to reschedule for any reason. That way you will have a confirmation of the date and time on file for later reference. Can I confirm your email address? It's listed here on your resume as john_doe69@gmail.com is that correct?
Recruit: Yeah that's it.
Me: Perfect! Please bring a hard copy of your resume to the preliminary interview, and remember to dress professionally.
Recruit: OK, thank you so much.
Me: We'll see you Thursday at 9 in the morning, you have a good day.

I needed to get at least 5 of those an hour. That rounds off to being about 12 minutes per person scheduled, which was unrealistic. If you do the math and consider an average phone call to be 4 minutes long, that's one person every 3 phone calls. There are a lot of roadblocks between me, the Recruiters Executive, and my actual job seekers from my list:

When someone didn't pick up the phone, my AFF LUCK manager instructed me to leave a brief voice mail asking to call back on the regular office phone line. If the recruit called back after I left the office, and my manager got the recruit's message on the answering machine in the early morning when I had classes, and called them back to schedule them for an interview, then it would not count towards my 5-an-hour requirement. People with incorrect or disconnected numbers just wasted my time glancing over their resume - which never took longer than 10 seconds, so extensively long 5-8 page resumes instantly got boring and overwhelming to grasp in the short amount of time that I had - and actually calling them to hear the "Number you have dialed is disconnected." People who moved to a new, far location often wasted my time by having me explain everything, only to say "Oh I moved to Georgia, sorry."

If anyone asked me questions like "How much do I get paid?" I was to answer, "Unfortunately I don't have that information right now, because I'm just a Recruiters Executive here, and the answer to that would depend on your agreement with our manager. The net amount that you would earn would be based off of which position you choose to accept, how many hours a day you work and how many days a week you come in." Clever, huh? Then those recruits who have come in for a preliminary interview with AFF LUCK already know what it's about, and are obviously not interested. Those who asked me what sort of tasks the jobs would entail, my answer had to be:

"The Accounts Executive position is a Business2Business sales position that involves getting in touch with local business owners to show them how offering AFF LUCK can financially benefit both the business and its employees. The Management position deals more so with things like staff recruitment, staff training, and just general things around the office such as assisting our existing employees with whatever tasks they might have at hand."

Chatting with coworkers, telling jokes and having fun distracted me from the thought that I was slightly bullshitting my recruits, because in reality, both the Management and the Accounts Executive positions are identical. Both had no base pay, were commission-only, and involved the same exact things despite different titles. The bottom line is, if you sell insurance at AFF LUCK, you're not an Accounts Executive OR a Manager, you're just a salesman with a good commission percentage cut. You would earn around $400 for every person that you sign up for AFF LUCK. Being my age wasn't old enough to do sales because you have to be 18 to get licensed by your state to sell insurance. Getting 5 new AFF LUCK customers a week would mean you get over $65k after taxes at the end of the year, AND about 3-4 fully paid, all-inclusive vacations. It's AFF LUCK Corporate's way to help successful salesmen relax throughout the year on holidays.

In my time with AFF LUCK, I did the math and found out that I averaged 2.75 recruits per hour. If you recall from earlier, Mr. Duck's official standard of productivity for a Recruiters Executive was 5 an hour, but he never really complained, because I had a lot of show-ups. For other "Recruiters Executive," hourly paid staff like me, the percentage of people who schedule an interview but don't even show up was a lot higher than me. Subsequently, I helped mt boss increase the net amount of new salesmen who signed up under him, thus earning more residual commission for my manager. In a way, I got lucky with a certain portion of recruits that chose to show up with higher frequency than those of other Recruiters Executive people. This made it all the while for Mr. Duck to keep me around calling people on their resumes.

Notice the wording, "Preliminary Interview." The term was selected deliberately, because the way AFF LUCK's interview process works is, you first come in for a group information session, and then if you're interested in getting started you can schedule a personal, one-on-one interview. Doing this allows current AFF LUCK agents who actually set new agents up with Sales School to hire more people, and waste less time doing one-on-ones with uninterested candidates. In my personal opinion, calling the initial "Information Session" a "Preliminary Interview" is inappropriate. The reason AFF LUCK's Recruiters Executives don't tell you this is because a lot of people shy away from group interviews, and it makes it even harder for them to schedule people to come in. Everything is very well thought-out at AFF LUCK, because it's designed to deal with volumes of people, even for a small office like the one I worked at.

The preliminary information sessions can be compared to an affiliate landing page for an online product, like an eBook or web hosting, where a company solicits you into helping it sell their stuff for them in exchange for a cut of the next price paid by the end customer. Except AFF LUCK deals with thousands of dollars, therefore it makes sense to do hiring in-person. Now, because it's all commission based, AFF LUCK hires anybody. Why? Because if you loaf around, it doesn't cost them anything: you just don't make any money. On the other hand, if you're a go-getter and a self-motivator, working in an unfulfilled market can be an untapped gold mine. There is good money to be made - just not if you're the type of person who likes to just clock in, be at work, and then clock out. If you're an AFF LUCK agent, you can basically set your own hours, because you're your own boss, so you make your own money.

This first "interview" consists of 5-20 people in a room in front of a dry erase board, where a very eloquent salesman from AFF LUCK makes his pitch. He's basically "selling" the job to them (which, in true terms of business, isn't a job but a business opportunity). He goes over things like AFF LUCK's history, how the state's been doing in terms of sales in the past X years, what sorts of policies this supplemental benefits company sells, what sort of businesses they work for, what your work day would look like, and how you can get started with Sales School. The entire session takes about 30-45 minutes, and the end result of it was a stack of resumes (or, if the recruit didn't bring a hard copy to their "preliminary interview," it would be a piece of paper with their name, phone number and email) of those interested to come in for a one-on-one. The next day, my job would include calling those people back, pretending like I care about how their interview session went, and asking what day would be best for a secondary one-on-one interview. Unlike group sessions that are scheduled a month in advance at certain times during the business days for weeks ahead, the one-on-ones would have specific time slots as per my manager's schedule (which he simply kept with Yahoo! Calendars).

Once a recruit signs up for Sales School, they're in the AFF LUCK company. The state licensing process cost around $300 in my state (not sure, but I would imagine it varies from state to state) and was one and only initial investment needed to get started with AFF LUCK. The Sales School took no longer than a few weeks of hard studying and test taking. This ~$300 fee goes to the state, not AFF LUCK, so technically you have to pay to start working there, but not to AFF LUCK itself. I was a Recruiters Executive, and therefore I did not need to go through Sales School because I did not sell actual policies.

As far as an actual job, if you're a motivated sales person, it's great. The office is upbeat and full of mostly young adults that are funny, not afraid to cuss in the office when clients or recruits aren't around, and who are actually smart with business. To me, it felt like being in on an episode of "The Office" TV show. However, I was told that a lot of people get started with AFF LUCK, make no sales, and leave after a month. Primarily it's because they're doing something wrong, because even if you cold-call for a month, you're going to close at least ONE business. And in each business that you visit, there's an 8 out of 10 chance that the majority of employees will sign up. Finding businesses that haven't been approached by AFF LUCK becomes a challenge - that's why most agents specialize in small businesses with 3-10 employees (because there's more of them). You can make a lot of money, but you've got to be aggressive.

Cold calling is an essential part of AFF LUCK. Calling people on their resumes as a Recruiters Executive has the same feel to it. Especially once my boss switched to CareerBuilder, and gave me sheets with people's names, phones, and emails instead of giving me access to a web site where I can actually look at someone's digital resume. The problem with this is that AFF LUCK has absolutely no databases that stores numbers of people that have already been called. Each Recruiters Executive has to call new names, but he doesn't know if one of the other hundred people from the same company has called that same person. So what happens in 90% of the cases is, a person says "I'm fucking sick and tired of AFF LUCK calling me. This is blatant harassment, REMOVE ME OFF YOUR LIST." Unfortunately, there is no list to remove them from, and it's 100% NOT my fault that they've already been called. I just didn't know, that's it. If I had, calling them would be a waste of time because I know I wouldn't schedule them for a preliminary information session. In worst case scenarios, they even threaten to report us! For offering them a job!

The end result is a huge waste of time and resources on behalf of the Recruiters Executive personnel like myself. I've made many hundreds of cross calls, and I can't even begin to imagine the amount of time I've wasted on those. At 90% failure rate, you would imagine how improbable it is to get 5 people an hour to sign up for their first visit to AFF LUCK.

So, as you would imagine, I got fed up with the Duck (not to be confused with Mr. Duck himself, because he's a great manager) and left to move on up to bigger things.