Pros
Opportunity to help families on placement of elderly. However, I'm not sure how much I really helped. I felt like most families simply used me to generate a list of senior communities in their area. They would then call or visit those on the list which they were interested in. They then looked to the staff at these communities for most of their help, and I often found myself in a position of "third wheel" despite my best efforts to help the family further. The organization provides good training in the issues of senior care, but the only thing that really matters in the job performance is sales -- which for me were few and far between.
Cons
Most of the leads are nearly cold. The seniorliving.net website pops up quickly in most people's search for a senior community, but the people need to provide contact information in order to get into the website. This contact information constitutes the leads, but most people really don't want to be contacted further and usually reject the follow-up phone call by a care advisor. There are also leads which are actual phone calls that people have made trying to get information, but most of the time these people think they are calling that particular community and do not want to talk to a care advisor in another state. My actual number of hours worked per week was about 60, since they will tell you that volunteering for weekend hours and jumping on leads as soon as they appear on the weekend is helpful. Despite all this work, only 1 or 2 months did I earn a commission over and above my base pay, which was about $23K. By the time I left, most of my training class had also resigned. For those few who have a knack for it and can be aggressive over the phone and are able to make sales, it's a decent job. But it happened often that I would spend huge amounts of time trying to get a family to move their senior relative into one of the senior communities in our network (which is a sale), but the family would choose a senior community which was not in our network (which is not a sale). And at the time I left, the majority of good senior communities were not in our network. No matter how good a salesperson is, a family which has seen a senior community from outside the network which they really like will not be convinced to move into another senior community which is in the network if they don't like it as much. Most of the families I worked with were not in my geographic area, so that I couldn't give them any in-depth advice on the communities to which I referred them. The information in the organization's database was quite skimpy for most of the communities. So the ability to match a family's particular needs with a specific community, which is what the organization advertizes, was usually non-existent. I would simply email the family a list of nearly all the senior communities in their immediate area.