I was contacted on Monday about a job with LN, the guy wasn't clear as to what the job was, it didn't sound familiar to me, but I decided to go anyway. My "interview" was on Wednesday.
After reading this I will not be accepting the job. Here are my reasons, many of them come from this site:
1) Some of the people who are defending LN on this site come off as, to put it politely, jerks.
2) One of the main differences between a successful agent and an unsuccessful one seems to be the training. If the training was good, the person did well, if not, well then, they didn't. (of course a person who didn't do well would naturally blame the training, but when they quantify it as being only 1-2 days long (as I was told mine was going to be), that tells me that the company doesn't spend a great deal of effort on training their new agents.
2b) The company seems to leave training up to the local agency, thus there is no corporate control over the process. Thus the quality of training can vary from agency to agency.
2c) Training is NOT daycare, its teaching the employee the tools they need to be successful. Granted not everything in this business can be taught.
3) They seem to take anyone they can get. One poster on here stated that he works in IT, but that they liked his resume'. They said the same thing to me: my only sales experience is Boy Scout popcorn, and I have a degree in Psychology (which, admittedly, isn't necessarily too far off the mark). This seems to be the norm for many insurance companies, not just LN, I have several other emails from companies stating the same thing (I like your resume's, good fit, successful, yada yada...).
4) A couple of former employees have stated that its not the same company anymore. Yes LN has been around since 1900 (I heard that several times in my interview), but it doesn't take long for a company to turn south, particularly when they have poor management, or are allowed to run amok.
5) Management should be based on management ability, not sales ability. It sounds great in the interview, but really, when you think about it, its just not a good idea (why would you take your best producers out of the field?)
6) My interview felt more like a sales pitch. I should be selling myself to the company, not vice versa. The guys that interviewed me even went to far as to ask me what I wanted out of a career. They wrote them up on the board and broke them down for me showing me how the company could meet those wants.
7) They called me. If they had actually looked at my profile they would have seen that I prefer to be emailed. However this was good for me because I found out that several other companies had been emailing me but that they had been getting caught in my spam filter.
In summary, LN seems like a good company with good products (they are rated A after-all). However the difference between success and failure does not seem to be determined solely by the amount of effort you put into it (which is what all the success stories have said here, and what the gentlemen I interviewed with said), it also seems to be determined by the amount of support you get from the people who hired you. This is not to say I want them holding my hand, but children do need training wheels on a bicycle before they can ride a motorcycle. I don't think a training program is too much to ask for. And if I'm expected to make phone calls in your office, give me a phone on which to call them. No telemarketer would used their own phone to sell company wares.
Furthermore, this doesn't seem to be just LN, this looks like it appears across the board with these unknown brands. They try to get as many agenst as they can, have them sell a few things, and then let them fizzle out so the company can keep the money—the execs have to eat too I guess.
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