Save yourself, go anywhere else! - Senior Search Consultant gpac Employee Review

Don’t be fooled by the initial interview calls, this is not running your own business like they tell you, nor do they live by their values: “faith, family, business”. You are a slave to the company and they determine your fate. It’s complete luck of the draw regarding the industry and market you’re assigned. If you’re put into a down market, you’re simply out of luck. You’ll speak with every hiring manager only to find out they’re not hiring, don’t use recruiters, or refuse to work with gpac because of their ridiculously high fees (33.33%) and unfavorable payment terms (full fee due on start date) and replacement guarantees (30 days). When you don’t find results, the managers force you to continue calling the same hiring managers over and over again. Which leads to a complete lack of trust and zero chance of signing and clients in that market. If you’re one of the very few lucky recruiters who gets assigned into a hot market, it’s actually very easy. But this is something that only about 5% of all recruiters in the company experience. The 60-90 minutes daily morning meetings drain the life out of you. They cover the same BS over and over again, making you want to beat your head against a wall. The shareholders will waste your time running through perfect scenarios that simply don’t work in real practice. This is not a sales job, yet they train you to brush off serious questions and use aggressive sales tactics to identify a need. Next, you’re forced to make 60-80 calls every day. As someone who made less than half as many calls as they required and tripled the results of those who met or exceeded that daily call requirement, I can say with 100% confidence forcing quantity over quality is a recipe for failure. They’re training recruiters to be dialers, not closers. The bi-weekly draw structure and tool sharing allowance also doesn’t work. They did briefly increase the draw pay, but only because a new government policy forced them too, but they reduced it as soon as they were legally able. On top of that, they charge you for the tools used to run your desk, and it comes out of your draw check! Then, once you make a placement after 4-6 (or longer for many) months, you don’t see any commission (and probably won’t until you make 3-4 more placements), because you only earn 25% of your production and need to pay back the draw. But this is by design! They don’t want 90% of recruiters to make it. All they want is for that recruiter to make 1-2 placements, so they can collect 75% of the production, fire that recruiter when their draw reaches $15k-$20k and write it off as a loss for tax purposes. On a similar note, they try to tell you the industry average for recruiters who make it is about 10% and that at gpac its 20%. This is also a complete lie. You’ll have 1-2 new recruiters join your team every 2-4 weeks and within 1-2 months they’ll be gone. Having worked at gpac for years, my educated estimate of recruiters who make it (at gpac) is 4-5%. So if you’re looking to get started in recruiting, go anywhere else and you’ll double or triple your chances of success. If you don’t have your own signed companies with assignments to search on, your manager will connect you with another recruiter who does. There are multiple problems with this. 1) you are putting all of your trust in that recruiter that the assignment is urgent, the company has realistic expectations, and most importantly is actually ready to hire and pay a fee. 2) you don’t know how many other recruiters have been working on the search, which more than often leads to doubling down on the same candidates, making people made, and wasting your time on a dead search. 3) these recruiters will often favor their own candidates to collect as much production as possible. You might have a better candidate, but they’ll come up with an excuse as to why they’re not willing to present your candidate to the company or even convince the hiring manager that their candidate is more suitable. This leads to tension and ruins the culture within your team. Here are some of the biggest warning signs: constant changes in management, building and dissolving teams, and making decisions without doing any research. In 2023 gpac had 36 teams, but by the end of 2024 they had dissolved 24 of those teams, leaving only 12 teams. This means a majority of those recruiters were fired and few were acquired by teams working other industries. Keep in mind each team has 20-25 recruiters, that’s a lot of people who put their faith in gpac and had their lives ruined because of the company’s poor decisions. I’ve seen tenured managers who a very bad at their job acquire high performing teams and the manager running that team effectively get demoted, simply to protect that more tenured managers. They are not your family, they only care about employees local to Sioux Falls. They even have a “roster” page on their company CRM where you can see all termed employees! Last year alone, they fired over 900 employees! Considering the number of changes and recruiters being pushed out, it’s clear that they’re throwing poop at the wall and hoping it sticks. I have so much more I could say, but all you really need to know is the shareholders are corrupt, greedy, and sinking this company much faster than they can swim. Do yourself a favor and don’t think or speak about gpac ever again. You’ll be much happier for it!