Pros
There were some nice people
Cons
So many. The job description tries to make itself sound glamorous, but all this job is is cold calling. At least the Relations Group side know they're sales people when they're hired, the IMN recruits are intentionally misled into not realising that this is just a sales role (there's deliberately no use of the word 'commission' and phrases like 'building relationships with producers, presenters and news journalists' are used when actually this just means you cold call and basically harass the journalists - I was given personal mobile numbers of journalists on more than one occasion without their permission, and told 'if one journalist at the station says no, contact every other journalist until you get a different answer' even though the station has already said no. You're made to feel like you're the problem, even though 90% of the campaigns and stories that you're trying to get the journalists to take are absolutely awful. Absolutely no structured, formal training. Just thrown in and then made to feel bad when you aren't doing well - even though the problem isn't the people selling in, it's the quality of the stories. The pay is less than minimum wage and hours are longer than most jobs (£16,000 starting salary for 8:30-5:30 hours). Why would you expect people to work hard when these are the conditions they're in? No wonder so many staff leave so quickly, there are no perks at all (no health insurance, flexible hours, bonuses). There's also no one with any HR qualification - not sure if this is even legal but it's definitely unethical, just highlights how little care or support there is for employees. There's even CCTV around the office so employees are constantly monitored. Clients are often lied to about their coverage. Told they're having an interview with Sky News, when really it's just a member of the IMN team pretending to work for Sky News (clients pay £950 for this and told as it's a news network the coverage can't be tracked - when really the interview is just uploaded onto Sky News's system with no guarantee it's ever used). Unethical practices like this wouldn't happen if staff were actually happy and motivated to work hard via fair pay and bonuses. There's a toxic culture of the sales team contacting any old company and lying to them about there being media interest in them, just so they pay the Relations Group and the sales people can earn their commission. Most of the time the campaigns are terrible (not the fault of the company, they were just lied to about there being media interest) and the IMN side don't get good coverage because of the poor quality of what there is to cover. It's a toxic cycle manipulated so the senior staff can make as much money as possible, at the expense of the underpaid, overworked and frankly exploited junior staff. CEO himself has even called it 'a churn and burn' environment. If you want to see the process the sales team go through, where they're encouraged to lie to companies 'telling them 'we've been contacted by 50 BBC radio stations who have said they're interested in a company like yours' so they're misled into being excited and paying Relations Group, go to the Relations Group website and add /training to the end. You'll see many videos showing the steps by step process of manipulating companies out of their money.