Nearly every stairwell in Mandeville Hall has at least one job posting for a company named “Vector Marketing,” complete with a scannable QR code and tearaway slips. Vector Marketing is a subset of Cutco Cutlery, helping to market their knives and recruit salespeople.
Most college students expect their first job to give them training and help them perfect their craft. Employers owe it to their employees, especially those with no prior experience, to provide them with opportunities they can only get through hands-on interaction. Some marketing companies teach student employees to sell properly. But Vector Marketing is one company that doesn’t teach; instead, it exploits students for their contacts.
Vector Marketing entices potential employees with the promise of a remote job that appears to pay triple the Pennsylvania Minimum Wage ($7.25/hour) and allows those with little-to-no experience to apply. This attracts students interested in earning the advertised $22. However, the $22 wage is not an hourly wage, which students might assume because most entry-level jobs are paid by the hour. The $22 pay is a “base pay/appt,” as written on the flyer, though this information is much smaller than the rest of the advertisement.
There is also evidence Vector Marketing does not give students adequate training to succeed in marketing. In fact, Vector Marketing was involved in two class-action lawsuits. One was Harris v. Vector Marketing Corporation, filed in 2008, and the other was Woods et al. v. Vector Marketing, filed in 2014.
Both lawsuits accused Vector Marketing of unjust worker compensation. Vector Marketing required employees to host demonstrations on how to use the knives, hence the “appointment,” which usually requires investing more money than the $22 base pay.
Ryan O’Leary, a student from George Washington University who worked at Vector Marketing in 2022 to find out what working there was really like, explains in a column that salespeople have to find their own leads for these demonstrations and are not given enough time to develop relationships with potential clients. As a result, students often end up leveraging their only assets: friends and family.
Vector Marketing uses deceptive recruitment tactics and does not fully prepare its student employees for future jobs. St. Joe’s administration should take an active role in removing its posters. If one more student falls for their tactics, that would be one too many.
