Pros
Give you a fantastic sales job when you are at interview and in training. Telling you what an opportunity you have been given, how wonderful the company is and about all the fresh wonderful leads you will be given on a daily basis. Have a kitchen with tea, coffee, fridge and microwave.
Cons
Health Online expect to own your soul for a very low salary, they have you working every hours overtime available - from early morning, to late night, including Saturdays. Staff routinely have to cancel holidays and weekends away in order to make sure they hit target. But the company has the audacity to publish an in-house brochure where staff talk about how important work life balance is. Management and training style mainly consists of passive aggression; ignoring you and treating you like a second class citizen when you are not selling, or doing the amount of overtime they deem appropriate, or by getting angry with you and frequently telling you what an "opportunity" you have been given. They have no staff loyalty and a very high attrition rate, firing people as soon as they are not performing. Many of the people I started with were escorted from their desks and fired during the middle of their shifts. Top sellers are promoted to middle management positions/team leaders who are totally unsuitable as people managers. As are most of the managers within the company. Health On-line has grown organically, like a small cottage industry, and ironically prides itself on how professional it is. But it is one of the least professional companies I have ever worked for. Naming and shaming and adviser by playing their phone call to entire department - while they were not present - as an example of a bad sales call?! The job role itself was the absolute epitome of mind numbing, on average you would only receive two or three new leads a day - one or two of these was likely a dead lead - the rest of the, very long day - was spent dialling old leads (some years old) multiple times, hounding poor customers, again and again, who had already been harassed ad-nauseam and clearly were not interested in the policy. Sitting in front of a PC that automatically dialled the next customer unless you paused it, a PC that would lock if you were more than one minute late back from your break - so you would then have to see a manager to unlock it for you, after you had explained why you were late. This is the same company that would frequently boast that it treated it's staff like "adults". Long term sales agents were held up as role models of what you could expect to earn - should you reach the elite - were given far better quality leads, that basically sell themselves. New starters are given leads that are years old and are expected to crawl over broken glass before they reach the upper echelons and are given the same type of leads. Advisers would also lose the bonus they had earnt for the previous month, if they didn't again hit target again on the following month. This ensured that many advisers never received any kind of bonus, despite working for the company for a significant period of time, and working every available hour, for a very basic salary. Between the excruciating, mind numbing boredom of the job (you were lucky to have more than 30 minutes of talk time, during a 10 hour day), the hours they expected to own you for, and the nigh on bullying behaviour of management, working at Health Online nearly pushed me over the edge.
