Summer Associate, Client Service

The Client Service team interfaces with our clients who are busy professionals working to tight deadlines in investment funds, consultancies, and Fortune 500 companies. They'll phone or email you when they need specific research, and will expect you to identify, recruit, and connect them with the most relevant experts as quickly as possible. You'll frequently work on several projects simultaneously, juggling multiple client requests at any given time. The nature of our clients' work also means projects frequently pivot or get canceled.

We entrust our Associates with direct client and project responsibility from the start. Through intense on-the-job training and a commitment to high-quality service delivery, Associates grow into our clients' unrivaled knowledge partners.

Associates drive commercial results by connecting our clients with experts who are precisely-matched against a given brief. You'll serve as the link between the two parties to seamlessly deliver on client research needs.

Associates are at the very core of our success. Rather than starting in an internal role, our Associates take on direct client responsibility and own commercial results from the outset. The more you embed yourself in your clients' workflows, the higher-quality interactions you can create each month, and the more impact you can drive for yourself and your team.

Throughout your day, you'll work on multiple projects for investors and business leaders seeking expert insights to inform their decision-making. This is a communications-intense, frontline role requiring you to multitask across parallel workstreams.

On any given day, you will be responsible for:

1. Expert recruiting: Confidently reaching out to and vetting experts who are uniquely relevant matches for your clients' projects, often under tight deadlines
2. Client service: Fielding incoming client briefs - which typically come in via email/phone call - and taking ownership of every aspect of your projects, from initiating and managing client-expert communications to meticulously scheduling calls to ensure seamless collaboration
3. Market context: Understanding the project context and the legal and regulatory environment in which your clients operate, applying compliance protocols to each situation
4. Commercial impact: Taking on direct revenue responsibility and owning monthly targets from the outset

Mastering the Associate role requires persistence - only through repeated practice will you achieve the efficiency, pattern recognition and experience that allows you to experiment and innovate within the role.

To see what working on the Client Service Team is like, take a look at the day in the life of Kai, an Associate, and Victoria, a Vice President.

As you progress in the Associate role, develop core competencies and gain more confidence, you'll take on more responsibility:

• Your first six months will be focused on learning the foundational skills of finding experts and proposing them to clients
• Within the first year, you will begin taking on project ownership, from fielding briefs and project set-up to client communications
• Within 18 months, you'll be entrusted with training an intern or new joiner on the desk
• In your second year, you'll be given more client-facing responsibilities - structuring client projects from start to finish, providing hands-on coaching to elevate your team's client service, and building user relationships on your account to grow the business.

The key to being a successful Associate is willingness to roll up your sleeves, pick up the phone and go the extra mile to make it happen for your clients. You'll need to be driven and keen to jumpstart a career in business, but also humble and committed to continuously learn. It's not an easy journey, but it makes for a steep learning curve and a fast-paced start to your career.

The Client Service path enables ambitious people to build a compelling professional profile on an accelerated timeline.

Across the career path, Client Service team members develop the following competencies:

• Business acumen
• Develop the ability to quickly make sense of economic value chains
• Build domain expertise in primary research-driven commercial diligence
• Communication and influence
• Speak confidently and compellingly with experts, clients, team members, and other stakeholders to achieve your goals
• Communicate professionally, succinctly and effectively in writing
• Project management
• Personally execute on multiple high-priority client projects concurrently
• Manage your team's successful delivery of projects end-to-end
• People leadership
• Interview and select exceptional candidates
• Manage and lead your own team
• Develop high-performing talent, guiding team members to promotion or aspirational external opportunities
• Commercial leadership
• Serve a blue-chip global client base comprising the world's top investors and business leaders
• Win new business and develop existing client accounts
• Deploy new products and services to drive client success
• Build a proven track record of commercial results

Our workflows are directly tied to client demand: you will experience various levels of work intensity throughout the day, often juggling multiple client projects that change in scope or pivot entirely on short notice. Days can be long at times, as they generally are in demanding professional service environments, but the upside is your clients' recognition and gratitude as well as the direct financial rewards that accrue to you from delivering results for your clients.

"Associates are consultants."
Unlike consulting firms, we don't advise our clients. Instead, we provide access to the expert knowledge they need and support them in structuring and conducting their research. The work we do is vital for our clients: it is through our Client Service Team's critical thinking and tailored research that our clients can access the precise expert knowledge they need.

"The role focuses on deep-dive industry research."
Your role is to connect the dots quickly and thoughtfully to help clients get specific knowledge efficiently. No two client projects are alike, and because each project requires you to develop an understanding of an industry's key players and value chains quickly, there is little time for extensive market research. Research is part of the role, but it is a means to an end, not your core mission.

"The Associate position is a sales role"
Client service is a client-facing, target-focused role, which brings the excitement (and stress) typically associated with sales roles. A meaningful part of your monthly compensation will be based on the number of client-expert interactions you facilitate. Your skill in building and managing relationships with clients and serving their needs better than competing providers is what makes you successful in this role.

What makes client service different from a sales role is that you won't be constantly prospecting new clients or selling a product or service made by someone else. Instead, you'll be serving a dedicated set of clients and pitching your own output: namely, the connections to uniquely relevant experts that you establish for your clients.

Following two years in the Associate role, you'll have the opportunity to step into a Senior Associate or Manager position, with Managers taking responsibility for a team of Associates and a set of dedicated accounts. Success as a Manager paves the way for potential promotion to Vice President, which entails leading a 'business-within-the-business.'

Colleagues who decide to leave AlphaSights at two distinct junctures - either as Senior Associates after successful completion of the Associate Program, or as third-year Managers - may qualify for AlphaSights' MBA Sponsorship Program, which provides financial support towards the program cost of some of the top business schools worldwide.

We are proud to see AlphaSights alumni at leading employers across finance, technology, and consulting, or propelling themselves forward as successful entrepreneurs.