I gave up on the call center idea. What a laughable joke. One of the other things I have been considering is working for a credit agency that does collections for other businesses. A number of people have said that they couldn’t do that because “you have to be so mean to people”. Well, is it actually being “mean” or is it just being firm. I realize that people probably get mad when you call them, but in my opinion, they have no one to blame but themselves.
Anyway, I’ve been “updating” my application at least twice a week at the one I want to work at. Hopefully, they will get tired of me bugging them and hire me.
However.
Having never done that type of work before, is it difficult or actually easy? Also, while I realize it probably varies from state to state, is there an average starting pay that a collection agent makes?
I haven’t, but a good friend recently took a part time collections position for a large “buy here pay here” used auto dealer. She hated it and quit after a couple of weeks. The pay was lousy - I think she said $7.50 an hour, in Michigan.
She said it people either hung up on her, promised to come in with payment as soon as they got paid/check cleared the bank/car came back from the shop, had to go out of state for a funeral, whatever. Or, they had terrible stories about being in hospital, getting evicted, a spouse dying…she commiserated, but was told “everyone lies.”
I imagine there must be people who enjoy it, though I can’t imagine why!
Well…That you can’t know for sure. They could be blameless and victims of unfortunate circumstances. That’s why I wouldn’t like such a job.
Besides, having to talk to mad people all day long, even the ones who are entirely at fault can’t be pleasant.
It can be an awful, soul-sucking job that can pay quite well. The successful collectors, with reputable agencies, don’t need to be “mean” to debtors, but most of us are a lot more concerned with keeping our numbers up than with being “nice” to our co-workers. Camaraderie and team spirit aren’t exactly SOP in the industry.
Base pay is moderately crappy, and commission (IME) runs from 1% of net above quota to 10% of gross. Depending on the agency, ownership of the portfolio, and the type of debt, I’ve made up to $65,000/year. I’ve also been fired for not making quota for 3 weeks in a row, and stiffed on 2 of those weeks.
Everything depends on the agency and portfolio. I’ve enjoyed some of them, and hated others. Student loans aren’t terrible, auto loans & credit cards are deeply sucky, doctor’s offices are all over the chart, hospital debt is fairly easy, with occasional horrific moments, and I would rather herd cats during a novocain-free root canal than collect for any business that advertises E-Z credit.
Debtors lie. Creditors mislead. Debtors forget. Billing misplaces things. Some debtors are hateful and rude. Some debtors are very polite. Some nutjobs don’t even owe a dime, they just freak out when their phone rings. A collector has to remember that none of those things are his/her problem. If it’s a legitimate debt, the collector’s job is to get the debt paid, so that the collector can pay his or her own bills.
My advice for getting a position is to do what you’re doing. POLITELY bug the hell out of the agency. Having a familiarity with the FDCPA will help with the interview, and with the job, but you need to bug ‘em to get the interview.
BTW – if they aren’t concerned with the FDCPA, you don’t want to work there.
Until you realize that you yourself are instructed to do anything to get money out of a debtor, including tactics that are just this side of scummy and unethical. And that you’re being given accounts that you may not have the legal right to collect, but they’re on your desk, so you’ve got no choice but to try to collect on them or risk losing your own job.
MadPansy, this is actually starting to sound interesting to me. I have a couple questions:
We are talking about a job where you call people on the phone and tell them to pay up, correct? You don’t actually have to visit their residences and break their kneecaps mafia-style or any such activity, yes? (not that that wouldn’t be interesting as well, but it would be a bit more dangerous)
Can I get one of these jobs with no experience and no college degree? If so, how do I go about it?
To be honest, if the place I was attempting to get a job at worked this way, I wouldn’t have even walked in the front door.
The place I am interested in has maybe 30 employees total and collections isn’t the only thing they do. The collections part of it really doesn’t seem to be all that forceful. I say that because I know of a person that had a $1200 debt for a car paint job turned over to them. He wasn’t happy with way the paint looked and the place that painted it basically told him “tough”. He got 2 or 3 letters in the mail from the collections place that listed the debt and interest etc., then never heard from them again. No wage garnishments. No nothing. And he never did get any phone calls. He never even contested the debt. It’s been something like 4 or 5 years now. Still nothing. So I don’t think they are unethical at all.
This particular place has been in business here in the same building for over 30 years. It’s a local business, not national. Actually, they have outlasted 2 or 3 national collection companies that have been here that have folded up and/or simply left.
At my old job at a TV station in Charleston, I handled “collections” along with my other duties. Basically, we were operating on a wing and a prayer and would run ads for ANYONE. We rarely did credit checks, and on one memorable occassion, I was overruled to run ads for these people who literally walked in off the street.
The salespeople were paid commission based on what aired. After 60 days they lost that commission. If the client paid up before 90 days, they got their commission back. After 120 days they lost it permanently and I got to take a crack at it.
I’d send three letters, a week apart, using a template provided from some How to Collect Old Debts book. They were professional and started out as “Oh, maybe this slipped your mind” then went to “Um, this is getting serious” to “Okay, I’m through screwing around with you, call me or I’m taking this to court.”
There were times I got someone on a payment schedule. There were times I’d file in small claims court and get a judgement. I was paid a percentage of what I collected. One time our judgement against someone screwed up them trying to sell the business. There were a few occassions when someone did eventually pay off their bill.
As long as someone made an effort, I would work with them. I was also living paycheck to paycheck, and I could understand getting in a bind. But if you ignore me, I’m going to file a suit, and I will win, because I have proof we provided a service and you declined to pay for that service.
Oh, goodness, yes. I’m a small woman who has no interest in ever getting punched in the face. I don’t do repos, and I don’t work for sleazoids. It’s 90% phone and paper work.
No experience and no degree (or one that has nothing to do with the field) is how most collectors start. Find a couple agencies, send your resume, and then call each one every other day, until they tell you they aren’t hiring. Stop calling for a couple weeks, then rinse and repeat. Be very polite, but very persistent.
To find the agencies, look in the phone book, ask friends, relatives & neighbors if they’d mind telling you which agencies are contacting them, ask local businesses which they use, and check your own credit.
Yep. The only time I have ever talked to a collection agent was a 2. We got billed twice by a cardiologist. Their office sent every bill to the wrong address. We finally got that straightened out in time for them to send us to a collection agency. That agent was the rudest thing on the planet and no matter what I said would just shriek that she wasn’t my secretary.
I ended up reporting both to the BBB and my insurance company and they dropped the charge and went away. It took 2 years.
My SO has been in collections for about 6 years now, he loves it and has always made good money. He just started with a place about a year ago (when we moved to CA) and makes somewhere about 32K before bonuses. I don’t keep close track but his bonus was over 2000 last month. He also has no degree. So yes, it is possible to make good money and keep your soul…at least I think he still has one…hmm…
My husband just got laid off from his job at a collections agency, although he was not a collector. Good ones can make pretty good money - much better than what he made as an IT guy.
And I sincerely wish you good luck in collecting on the judgement. My grandmother, a landlord, has judgements against dozens of people, but as she says, “You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.” She rarely saw a dime from it.
Sometimes, she would get a garnishment of wages if the amount she was owed was high enough, but the debtor would often just quit their job to avoid paying it. IIRC, if she ever discovered they were working somewhere else, she could go back to court and repeat the cycle, but the futility of it wore on her over the years until she just gave up.
I have done both in-house and at an agency (3rd party). I hate, hate, hate it. One thing you must have is a very thick skin. Another is a love for (or at least not a loathing of) talking to strangers on the telephone. (I hate talking to strangers. I hate talking to anyone on the telephone. Put them together, and it’s my idea of hell.)
I can tell you that all of the collectors I ever worked with had a fat ass from sitting all day. They could’ve chosen to get some exercise on their personal time, but for some reason, not a one ever did. You’d think some exercise to relieve stress would be just the think in a job like collections.
At the agency I worked at, people had to sit in a cubicle with a telephone headset on, and the computer (mainframe, in those days) had a dialer program that would dial the debtors’ numbers for them, and simultaneously bring up the debtors’ account information on the terminal in front of the collector. The collector would have to type notes quickly while they talked, and as soon as they hung up on the call, another one would be patched through.
They put me on the dialer once. I actually managed to get someone who paid their large hospital bill with a credit card. Still, I didn’t want to do it. I was actually hired to do skip-tracing, which is only slightly less odious to me (you use reverse directories and other means to try to find ways to get the debtor on the phone (or at least get someone to agree to deliver a message) when their old number is no good any more. I also did some clerical tasks.
All of my other experience is with commercial accounts - companies that were past due paying my employer for services rendered. Much easier - you get to talk to mostly the same people, and it’s very rare that anyone takes it personally or gets abusive (though it can happen, especially with very small businesses and attorneys).
About five years ago i got a call from a debt collection agency. The person asked for me, so i said “Speaking.” They told me that they were from the collections department of a Baltimore-area hospital, and that they were calling to collect my outstanding debt for the medical procedure i had undergone at that hospital the previous year.
I informed them that, as i had been living in Australia for the whole previous year, and had only arrived in the United States a few months ago, it was highly unlikely that i had undergone such a procedure in their hospital. Besides, i was sure that i would have remembered it.
It seems that they didn’t know where their debtor was, so they just called eveyone in the phone book with the same name. Neither my first or last name are especially unusual, and i’m sure that there are quite a few people around who share my the pair with me.
When it happened the first time i didn’t worry too much. It was when i received the second call that i got pissed off, because obviously no-one had bothered to note that i was not the guy they were after. This time, i reamed out the caller and then asked to speak to her supervisor, for whom i also had choice words. Never heard back from them again, so it was a happy ending.
