Allegheny students could be working a part-time sales position with Vector Marketing over the winter break, according to an email from the college’s Career Education team on Tuesday, Nov. 29,.
“Alum, Case Kunick ’11, has reached out to our office, on behalf of Vector Marketing, to promote this part-time job opportunity,” the email stated in part. “As District Sales Manager in Erie, Case can provide direct insight to working for a company that’s been featured in Forbes and Business Insider … Students have the opportunity to work part-time or full time during the break and can choose to continue during the semester around classes. The position Vector Marketing offers can support your resumé building and improve presentation skills, time management skills, and networking.”
The email also included a link to apply to the position through career networking website Handshake.
Vector Marketing is the sales arm of Olean, New York-based cutlery firm CUTCO. Essentially, its employees market and sell CUTCO products in one-on-one demonstrations. In a phone interview with The Campus last week, Kunick described the job as “completely an online position.”
“If somebody’s working with us, they’re getting on a computer, the customer — that they pick — is getting on their computer, and then they’re just watching videos about our brand, they’re watching videos on the history of our product,” Kunick said.
Vector has come under fire in both lawsuits and the court of public opinion since the 1990s for the way it recruits high school and college-aged students. According to The Washington Post, in 1994 the state of Wisconsin ordered Vector to stop deceiving student recruits about the company’s pay structure, which led to the company stopping — at least for a time — recruiting efforts in the Badger State. In 2011, the company reached a $13 million settlement in a lawsuit that alleged that Vector did not pay its sales representatives minimum wage. Five years later, Vector reached a $6.75 million settlement in a class-action lawsuit that took issue with Vector’s mandatory-but-unpaid training.
For his part, Kunick said that much has changed since those lawsuits. He laid out the company’s pay schedule, which for students working under his Erie office, would pay at least $22 for each sales appointment completed.
“We do have a commission rate as well,” Kunick said. “Each person — even the president of the company, even myself — started at what’s called a 10% pay rate. As soon as I hit my first promotion at $1,000, that bumps up to now 15%. Once I’ve successfully sold $3,000 in products, that bumps up to 20%. Once that hits $6,000 that bumps up to 25%, and once I’ve successfully sold $10,000 worth of CUTCO, I’m now at 30% commission. That never goes away.”
Kunick added that the pay for each week is based on either the commission rate or the appointment rate — not both.
“This is where some students get confused, even though we’re very very very clear in the interview process,” Kunick said. “Every week, we add up how many appointments you had, and every week we add up how many sales you had. We do not give both for each and every week. What it is is that you always get the higher amount between the two.”
Kunick also said that the onboarding process for new sales representatives foregrounds the unpaid nature of the job’s training.
“Now when people start the training, there is a section where they have to fill out their information and they are agreeing this is an unpaid training video series,” Kunick said. “They now have to click it and accept it — kind of like when you download (an app to) your phone and it says ‘do you want to use the app for this,’ or like ‘do you want to use location services,’ you have to agree into it.”
Associate Director of Alumni and Employer Engagement Autumn Parker, ’16, said that Career Education’s promotion of the Vector opportunity was part of ongoing efforts to broaden Career Education’s work. She noted that while many students worry about the post-graduate job market, others may need or want work as students.
“We also recognize that our students sometimes don’t want to solely focus on the degree-seeking career needs,” Parker said. “Sometimes they just need part-time extra income opportunities, and so Case reaching out (with) Vector is more along those lines of providing that extra-income, part-time work.”
Parker added that the intent of the email was less to specifically highlight Vector and more to encourage students to think about part-time work as an option over winter break.
“I should have put in that email that it’s not just Vector Marketing that’s hiring for a part-time,” Parker said. “There are plenty of other employers out there who are in need and can provide you this opportunity to do whatever experiential exploration that’s in accordance with your need and fit at the time.”
So far, Parker said she has only heard of one Allegheny student that has applied to Vector because of the email, an international student who did not think the company was hiring for direct selling.
“She wasn’t aware of that until she got into the interview and she was like, ‘you know what, this isn’t the type of marketing work I thought you were promoting and it’s no longer a fit for me’ and she turned them down and they were okay with it,” Parker said. “It wasn’t a horrible experience, it wasn’t a grand experience, it was an informative experience. And now she knows that is not the subset of marketing that she wants to pursue, and that’s not how she wants to use her winter break.”
While the company takes pride in its student-oriented work structure — even stating on its website that 85% of its sales representatives are students — some schools have taken the step of banning the company from their campuses altogether.
In 2019, the student government of Augsburg University in Minneapolis passed a resolution banning Vector from the university’s campus, according to Augsburg’s student newspaper The Echo. In October of this year, the University Students’ Council at Western University in Ontario, Canada, told the university’s newspaper, The Gazette, that Vector would not return after being spotted advertising on campus.
Some — including Los Angeles Times columnist David Lazarus — have dubbed the company a “multi-level marketing” scheme, though Vector describes itself on its website as “a single-level, direct-to-consumer marketing company.” Countless other essays, news and opinion pieces, many authored by undergraduate students, call the company “unethical” and recount stories of students who joined the company but found its operation concerning in some way.
Kunick said the criticism was unfounded, and cited online misinformation as creating a false image of Vector.
“A lot of students are confused, they go to the internet, and that then confuses them even more, because they’re either reading outdated information or they’re just reading information from people that didn’t even ever start the job, they just heard from a friend of a friend and they made a video about it for clickbait,” Kunick said.
He pointed to his own experience with the company, where he has worked since 2010, when he started selling CUTCO as a junior at Allegheny. Kunick also offered to connect interested students to Allegheny alumni who had worked with Vector.
“I understand that getting a new job is a new experience, and this job can be very instrumental in someone’s young adult life, like it was in mine,” Kunick said. “Because I actually worked hard at the opportunity, because I wanted to see if I could do something new, I had a lot of success right away which then kept me in the company and I’ve sold a lot of these knives. I know it’s not for everybody, but it was a great fit for me.”
Parker said that Career Education also wanted to let students decide for themselves whether or not a sales position would be right for them. She noted that when the office had advertised open positions with Vector in the past on social media, some alumni had commented that they had had negative experiences while working there.
“We didn’t want to dismiss that,” Parker said. “Rather, we took that in consideration with the fact that we had students who also worked for them and had positive experiences.”
The overall message of the email was that working on one’s career does not mean only thinking about life post-graduation, according to Parker.
“It’s all about equipping you to make the best decision according to the need of that time, and of course, we want it to reflect the learning outcomes of an interdisciplinary education,” Parker said. “We’re trying to encourage students to leverage their winter break as still proactive opportunities to engage in some experiential exploration. It’s allowed to be part-time work, if that’s what you need.”