On Friday 22nd May I replied to a vaguely worded job description posted on reed.co.uk. It read;

DO YOU HAVE THE X – FACTOR ?

Birmingham based Advertising company looking for individuals with a great attitude to work within a lively outgoing environment.

We are looking for people with that special X – Factor that can be trained up to join our busy PR team.

Must have excellent skills in customer service, confidence in their communication levels and be willing to be trained from scratch.

Full training given with opportunities for advancement for the career minded.

Please forward your CV to us for consideration.

Ten days later they made contact.  According to the man on the phone I had enough “X – Factor” to get an interview.  When I returned home there was an email from Scorpia Corporation informing me that I was also being considered for their “Business Development Program”.  Further details could be found on their website, ANB Promotions.

This is when I became suspicious.  Scorp Corp had placed the advert on behalf of The Cobra Group, part of which was ANB Promotions LTD, the company I would be working for if my interview was successful.*

Ignore that scorpions and cobras poison their prey, ignore that ANB stands for A New Beginning and sounds like a new-age cult, just look at the website.  It looks very professional, with a lot of stock photography and very little detail.  If I was part of an undercover operation this is the kind of site I’d put together to try and convince the public that we were legitimate.  Look at their contact page, their location pulsates, as if at any moment it will vanish, and the man in the dark glasses looks nothing if not shady.

It was at this point that I wondered if ANB Promotions was my Credit Dauphin, if like Sydney Bristow in Alias I’d be recruited for what on the surface appears to be a banking corporation but in reality turns out to be a criminal organisation.  When a business says they’re “a leading below-the-line direct marketing specialist representing an array of national and international clients” you wonder what you’re going to be asked to do.  As it turned out it wasn’t ripping off jumpsuits to reveal slinky cocktail dresses and abseiling in heels, although it was seven floors up from a cross-dressing strip club.

ANB Promotions is located in Chinatown in Birmingham and provides other businesses with new customers.  One of their most recent clients is Sky TV.  Sky currently have 9.3 million customers in the UK and are aiming for 10m in the next five years.  Here are some facts that make ANB happy; Sky’s closest competition is Virgin who are losing 2,500 customers a month.  Some people are just trying to save money, others are unemployed, both are watching more tv and scrutinising how much they pay for this service.

I passed the first interview.

Then I completed the evaluation day.

Then I passed the second interview.

Then I was invited back for the training week.

Then, if I passed the end of week test, I would have a job selling pay tv door-to-door.  This job would be commission based, so if no one bought Sky then I wouldn’t get paid.

The training week began on Monday at 9:30am with some of the most detailed paperwork I have seen in a long time.  Hair colour, eye colour, height.  A five year history of all employment, unemployment and education to the exact date with no omissions or overlaps.  I was also required to arrive with eight different documents, including a reference I had to source and print over the weekend.

Afterwards we went into a boardroom.  We were given talks and we took tests, I dubbed this part Sky School.  Most days we didn’t finish until at least nine at night.

On Wednesday I got to go out in the field with my Sky Buddy Kristel, as I had done on the evaluation day.  Kristel was born in Estonia, lived in Norway and has worked with ANB Promotions for over a year now.  She has an amazing sense of humour, bought me an umbrella when it rained and is very good at what she does.

Then on Thursday we did the same again, only this time with less rain, flying bugs, and unfortunately, less sales.  Every day each field representative is given a walk sheet (note my correct usage of technical terms there) detailing 100 names and addresses of people who can afford Sky tv but are currently with someone else.  The average success rate is seven.  For the entire week.

Friday I quit.

I met some great people and I learnt a lot about sales, psychology and body language but this job was not for me.  In the short term I had to jump through a lot of hoops to make money that wouldn’t have covered my transport costs.  Long term this job could have been quite profitable but I’d be trapped in a tiring, repetitious, mentally draining job.

The job hunt continues on Monday.

* A subsection of The Cobra Group is Appco Direct LTD.  ANB Promotions and Lifestyle Advertising are both subsections of Appco Direct.  While the email suggested I’d be working for ANB it turned out I was working for Lifestyle.  Both companies share the same office and do exactly the same things, only with different coloured folders.  Mine was red.