by Lisa Fagan

Created on: September 06, 2008

The worst companies to work for are high-pressured outbound telemarketing and market research firms, as well as inbound call centers; and I've worked for them on and off for the last 25 years.

They constantly put excessive and unnecessary pressure on you to meet pratically impossible sales and completed survey quotas; to keep your production and dialing rates, to keep your alk time low, and to get these people on and off the phone as quickly as possible.

I remember working for a fundraising firm in downtown Philadelphia from April of '96 to November of '97. Their clients were colleges, universities, cultural organizations, public television stations, Catholic secondary schools, and so forth. In my personal opinion, the Philadelphia Zoo was their biggest clients, and provided us with work from May to October.

They were constantly calling you into the office for every little bit thing that goes wrong, and believe me, I was no exception. They did not want you to take "NO" for an answer the first time, They wanted you answer the objections and negotiate these pledges. Just two months before I left there, they sent me home because my pledge rate was too low. Over a year earlier, they wrote me up and suspended me for the same reason.

One night, we started fundraising campaign for a ballet company out in Arizona. The client heard a call that she wasn't happy with, and the manager (this company had three managers that monitored each campaign's progress) chewed us out and used the "F" word. After he left, I was in tears and I let the other managers know about it.

The straw that finally broke the camels back came when one of the managers called both me and the other fundraisers on the WNET (Channel 13 in New York) into the office. They were on the verge of losing the contract because the production rates were too low. Well anyway, he told us that we needed to perform. Even when I went back to my desk to make some more calls, I still got the same results. These people have already been oversolicited. At the end of the night, I had told my manager that I was putting in applications and resumes in other places and that I had to do what I had to do. He then said that he had to do what he had to do, and the next day, I applied for what was to be my next job. More on that later.

This fundraising job was the equivalent of high-pressured telemarketing. They were in business to please their clients and make money at the same time. Even though they helped out n non-profits, they were

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