Knighthouse / Phoenix / Schofield Media
Pros
Ok place to grab a few paychecks while you look for a real job, but only if you're absolutely desperate. If you can find ANY sort of honest work avoid this at all costs. This job will make you feel truly disgusting if you have any sort of moral code. The sales management can actually help you improve your phone sales chops if you listen to the pointers. Good luck in the future when Knighthouse or whatever name they choose next inevitably collapses under the weight of their terrible business practices.
Cons
Everything: complete scam business model, everyone in the industry and everyone they try and scam knows their stupid game. They've burned pretty much all bridges except with the dumbest of clients. They have gone through multiple names such as : Phoenix Media, Schofield Media, Red Coat Publishing, and now Knighthouse Media. Soon they will be moving to a new office on Michigan Ave (sometime early 2017) and I would look out for another name change as well. The company has had at least 3 different names in the last decade, re-branding each time people catch on to their slimy phone scam. They say there is no cold calling in the interview (blatant lie), then hand you a crappy script and a huge stack of outdated "leads" to call after 2 days of training (sitting in a room alone, reading the script over and over to yourself). You need to make 100+ calls per day to people who mostly already know this is a scam since they've been calling the same companies over and over for 16 years now. Your leads will frequently overlap with multiple other people in the call center. If you actually find someone stupid enough to do business with Knighthouse Media, the model goes like this. The client gets a puff piece article about themselves in whichever is the most relevant magazine to their industry (they "publish" at least 15 different "magazines"). In return for the article, the client turns over a list of their business relationships. Knighthouse Media's team of sleazy inside sales people then bombard the list of companies with "opportunities" to buy expensive advertising space in the magazine in order to support the article. They pressure the client's business partners/vendors into advertising by saying that if they don't support the article, it wouldn't reflect well on their relationship with the company that gives them income. Not only is this an incredibly scummy and predatory business tactic, but these magazines absolutely do NOT circulate anywhere. They claim to reach "over 300,000 C-Level Executive subscribers" with specific trade magazines where it would mean 150%+ market saturation. Yet somehow none of these executives have ever seen a hard copy of the magazine when asked, unless they bought into the scam and had an article written about them. Then they receive a copy. The magazine reaches literally nobody else and their circulation numbers are a complete scam, not to mention each article is a canned formula that reads like a bad advertorial. Every article sounds and looks nearly identical. I could go on and on about the lies they tell potential clients and the shady tactics they employ to swindle people too dumb to Google the company name before buying, but I think you should be getting the picture by now. Avoid at all costs.