“Explore” your way out of joining this company - Recruitment Consultant Explore Group Employee Review

They ask you how you want to be managed at the beginning- this is pointless as you are micromanaged regardless. Mediocre training which is condensed into a couple of weeks. Most companies have the training academy’s running for 12 weeks at least. They’ll feed you a pack of lies in your interview and/or training, claiming that they aren’t KPI driven and don’t care about how few or how many deals you do. This could not be further from the truth. They want quantity over quality and are heavily KPI driven - amount of dials, call times and even LinkedIn inmails are read out in the open plan office, tracked on cube 19 and if you are behind on just one call, the whole office will know about it! At Explore there is a very cliquey atmosphere, (think ‘you can’t sit with us’ - mean girls). No one cares about you if you’re not in the main ‘clique’. This isn’t conducive to a good, positive working environment is it? Everyone on the team is asked by senior management to leave good reviews on Glassdoor when someone posts a bad one! 6 of the positive reviews were all posted on the 28th June last year and this isn’t a coincidence. There is an incredibly high turnover which explains why they are interviewing people every single week. All day everyday you just watch numerous prospective employees go in and out of the meeting room. The fact I was told “we're always hiring” in itself is a massive red flag. I spoke to some people who said that they got offered the job before they even left the interview room! This alone gives you an idea of how high their turnover is and just how desperate they are. All they’re looking for is someone with a pulse. Maybe the internal recruitment team should focus on staff retention as opposed to recruiting frantically like someone is holding a gun to their heads. It’s almost like a competition ‘who can stay the latest’ even though they might have little to no work to do. Work life balance is discouraged here, you’re expected to work late everyday (apart from Friday) and at weekends. Preferential treatment to some employees is typical at explore. When some consultants decide to leave at their contracted finish time on a daily basis, nothing is said but when others do, even just once, they are berated and asked ‘early finish today?’ I witnessed a member of senior management openly expressing who his favourite consultant was and this was reflected in his behaviour towards this consultant in contrast to other members of the team. Mistakes are highlighted and ridiculed in front of the whole team in the meeting room, it’s like a roasting session, which is why it’s a toxic environment to be in. Saturated markets - some markets have up to 5 or 6 people working on them whereas in others there are 1 or 2 people working on them. Consequently people call/ threaten to take each other’s candidates even though there’s supposed to be ‘candidate ownership’. No structure when it comes to working on roles, everyone more or less works on the same roles. There’s no client ownership either which can result in someone compromising your relationship with a particular client whom you’ve been building a relationship with. Bullying culture, most conversations are had in the open plan office (despite the fact there is a fully functioning meeting room next door). Mice problem in the office - seeing mice/rat droppings in drawers and packets of food nibbled through, as well as seeing live furry friends in the office. The community manager having to come in regularly to investigate the unhygienic conditions was not uncommon. It is all well and good consultants billing large sums of money per month but it would be great if everyone firstly took a look at their basic hygiene and how they leave their working conditions for themselves and their peers. Way too much of a regimented environment. Everyone goes to lunch at the same time, you can’t go from say between 12 and 2. It’s reminiscent of a school day. There’s no flexibility whatsoever in terms of working from home, flexi time which other recruitment companies provide. HR is basically non existent. At Explore, you’re not treated like a person - you’re just a number, a bum on a seat. Which explains why they’re constantly hiring - they’re churning people out like in a factory.