I ran across this report looking for an article on Google published by our company. Up front point: I am a member of the management team at National Strategic. I've worked here for about 2.5 years. I hate to turn away good potential employees reading your post, so I am going to post a reply and offer a different side of the story to some of your points.
I want to clarify a few things for you or folks reading your comments.
You were hired for our performance-pay marketing arm. You were informed up-front of the following:
National Strategic is almost always a performance-pay company. We get money from our clients by either helping them operate more efficiently or by marketing their products. Our clients love us because we don't typically charge them money until we deliver results. In my 2.5 years I have worked wide array of clients across multiple industries - from finance, real estate, medical services, software, and consumer goods.
This is the point that you're upset about: we only pay our employees based on the value they add to the company. If your work generates results for our clients, they pay us and we pay you. It's simple. In your first 3 weeks (which is what you claim you tried), it's typically hard to add a ton of value if you're learning about your product line for most of that time - but most people in marketing manage to run a succesful campaign or two. It sounds like you just weren't that good at your job. Maybe you would have seen results in your fourth week, but I don't really know who you are or what your work entailed.
You listed our Wickliffe office in your post. It's true that we are consolidating operations to a building on Euclid Ave. We were renting 3 seperate offices in Ohio and decided to buy a building very recently. That, to me, demonstrates success of a company. Our offices are not frequently used by employees, who typically do a lot of work from client sites or remotely, and use the offices for meetings or client visits.
Our company was seperated previously (the marketing, consulting, and finance arms had seperate names and operations). Because of the economy's recent contribution to our growth and restructuring - more marketing employees are getting a chance to do some consulting work - Eugene decided to merge the companies together - this was also expalined to you in the interview.
And speaking of that - I will tell you what I think is fair about our company's hiring process and policies for marketing folks:
If our company ads a product line, we have to hire marketing employees
-Our admin posts job ads everywhere
-Our hiring team reviewes 200-500 resumes at a time and chooses 10 people.
-5 of the 10 poeple get pre-screened and invited out to an interview, if they are good.
- ** The first part of an interview is an interactive information session where someone from senior management talks about the company, the philosophies and the position. Prospects are asked to participate, and we subtly choose a few people to move to the next round.
- We are selective and pick 0, 1 or 2 people to interview in the next (one on one) rounds.
- We try to hire 1 person from each round, but are happy if we can hire 2. Sounds like you were it.
The whole point of having an information session at the beginning of an interview is to prevent unproductive situations like this one. You are obviously not comfortable being paid and promoted based on the value you add to the company, and the information session should have weeded that out. I have plenty of very successful entry level folks making 3%-10% of the sales their markeing campaigns generate. These folks make very good money, but they are also refining their technique for when they advance with the organization.
Again, we are very popular with our clients and we find ourselves growing A LOT in this economy. People are promoted very quickly in this environment.
If we hired you I'm going to hope that you're not a stupid person.. so one of the following must be true:
-You were not given the opportunity to be successful during your training because your manager failed to set you up for success.
-You are not the kind of person who can thrive in an un-micromanaged environment and need a boss standing over you telling you what to do to get your job done.
-You are just bad at your job, lost confidence after you were asked to design a marketing campaign and resorted to chasing sales rather than magnetizing them, becoming discouraged after some rejection.
-You didn't ask for help when you needed it.
-We made a bad hiring decision.
Any combination of these could be true - but here's the real point: we have many successful employees, we have many clients who love us, and we're growing. You made an informed decision to work for us, and failed. You should not try to blame the company and generate negative publicity, instead you should try to develop a plan to improve your own career outside of consulting or marketing.
