Pros
If you're interviewing for this job, you'll get it. Their business model depends entirely on hiring more people to be telemarketing assistants each month, to the point that it walks a line dangerously close to being a pyramid scheme. The office will get free lunch once a year if everyone goes on Glassdoor or your state's respective "Best Places to Work" survey site and giving them a 5 star review all the way down. (Check out the reviews from current employees on this very site). The office will be young and full of recent graduates or recent college drop-outs looking for any job, and HR is very lax (or non-existent) so the office environment is lose. There might be a ping pong table that you can play on once you are done with work. They keep TVs on in the background. I think the coffee is free in some offices.
Cons
I'm going to be absolutely blunt, because I wish I had read this before turning down other job offers and working at TQL. If I can save someone else from the job, it's worth it. YOUR FIRST SIX MONTHS: When you begin this job, you will start as a "trainee," or LAET as they like to call it. What you really are is a full time, 55+ hour a week telemarketing assistant that doesn't have the agency to even leave their desk. You will have to ask permission to go on bathroom breaks (some offices, literally, have a key you have to sign for). Either you bring a lunch you can keep at your desk and take calls/call out on trucks, or you do not eat during the week. Here, while you 'train,' you will make 100+ phone calls a day to truck drivers, trying to sell truckloads to them. Look up how TQL is viewed in the industry with a few Google searches and see about sales tactics they encourage--lying about lanes, haggling and undercutting drivers on pay, lying about loading and unloading times, weights, falling out on commitments to trucks, anything--and you'll have a good idea of the level you'll have to sink to while you earn no money for yourself, other than the small paycheck and nearly criminal benefits you'll earn during your employment. Benefits don't matter because trainees in any capacity are *not allowed to take off for any reason.* I personally witnessed someone chastised after having to go to the hospital. The company culture they espouse is a 'work hard, play hard' environment, but in reality it's predatory on new graduates or those that don't have professional work experience yet, and don't realize they are being taken advantage of. AFTER 6 MONTHS: Congraulations, you are now a broker (telemarketer). You will roll off and be responsible for building your own business. Here is how it is done: You will stay up each night until 1:30 AM, using their in-house prospecting system to 'tag' people you are allowed to call for the next day. All prospects fall off after 21 days from people tagging them, simultaneously, at 12:30 AM EST. Every broker in the company will be logged in from their home computer, and once the prospects fall it is a rush to tag each and every thing as fast as possible, like a bunch of starving dogs under a dinner table hoping for any scraps. This is expected to get worse, as they are trying to hire as many assistants as possible to make as many calls a day as possible in order to get maximum growth, while they fight around 60% yearly retention. You'll make 80-100 prospecting calls a day from this random list you clicked as fast as you could the previous night, to prospects that have already been harassed by the previous TQLer with zero sales training and background for weeks on end, begging for any freight you can move for them. Zero emphasis exists at all on sales techniques or training, and instead the holy grail of the company is nothing but outbound calls and call times. When you go in to interview, ask if you can listen to the broker make a sales call that you will sit with and shadow, and cringe listening to them in all its glory as they get sworn and screamed at for making the Nth call of the week to them--and have the nerve to actually argue back and be abrasive to who they are speaking to. TQL doesn't stop calling, they do not give any ample sales training to their employees, and they don't respect no call lists. Google "tql won't stop calling" or "tql solicitation calls" for a great list of customer complaints and law suits of public record. Shady business practices are encouraged, and the company itself sits at the bottom of the industry when it comes to respect. Once you start consistently running freight, you are expected--literally--to be a 24/7 contact for all drivers currently on the road, and you will receive anywhere from 5-20 calls over night each night to your cell phone, to solve issues ranging from the driver is upset to full blown claims or customs situations that are completely out of your control. Once your average climbs to over $4,000 a week over a 12-week average--which, means you worked for around a year and a half at this break-neck pace at exactly $35,000 a year without any commission on top of it--you're now eligible to get an assistant. You will be responsible for training them yourself, but at least you can pawn off horrible lanes and tasks to them. See the first paragraph. OPPORTUNITIES TO MOVE UP: These do not exist. Brokering is 98% of the work-force of this company, and anyone above the GSM (telemarketing floor manager) of the company gained their credentials at other companies, obtained experience and education to the MBA level, then were hired on. As a broker, your opportunity for advancement is one track, with no increases in pay for your added responsibilities: broker (LAE), broker with Saturday junior-manager privilages (LAESGL), and broker that gets to look at call times and makes sure people aren't ever late, or going home sick (LAESTL). If in your years as a broker you land a huge account, which I would say comes out to a liberal estimate of <1% of brokers, you may after a few years of work be asked to open a new branch in a remote area without any pay increases as they stock it full of new, young, naive assistants. So a 5 year track with zero personal development that will help you on the job market, other than at TQL. TQL also has you sign an unconventional and highly aggressive 2-year non-compete agreement (which is honestly unenforceable in any court if you are within a certain distance of their office, but you will still get plenty of threatening letters to yourself and your new employer as they try to get you fired or blackballed). IN CONCLUSION All-in-all, the job itself is not that great. If you like being a telemarketer, or your prospects are glum due to previous arrests, no degree, prior DUIs, poor credit and no references, this might be a good 5-6 month job for you while you find something elsewhere. Beware, almost any and all reviews you will find about the company online were done as standard procedure--as mandatory by employees as per company policy. There are better jobs for new graduates, go to Enterprise or check out Insurance sales jobs if you want to get your feet wet in the sales world. This is not it.