The recruiter initially told me that I was a great fit but the position was different and not as senior as my experience. I didn’t think it was a good fit for me, but I continued with the process to see if they possibly mistitled the job.
Questions were very formulaic and did not touch on how my skill set would help grow the company. She also asked if I could design within templates. This is a bit odd because if you are looking to stay within templates, you would hire an entry-level production artist instead of a senior creative. I asked pointed questions about the current website, such as: Is the management looking to update the design (currently a basic template design), and she couldn’t answer that question.
She told me that, their process is to have me complete a test project, no more than 30 minutes. I told her that I not only have my portfolio to show my design capability, I have also passed all of the relevant LinkedIn skill assessments and that I usually don’t do test projects, but I would take a look at it.
There are two reasons why you should never do these test projects. 1. I have had companies in the past that need artwork done and they set up a job posting just to get free creative work. 2. There is no way a 30-minute design will be able to show the type of work that I normally do—Work that gets results!
Finally, when I asked about recent negative Glassdoor reviews, she responded that they are in the process of hiring a company to clean their Glassdoor profile. Then she suddenly needed to get off the phone, for another call.
My assessment is that the Jan 5, 2021, former employee review was correct. It is my belief that they possibly could have built a system where they cycle through designers at a high rate. Typically, this means that the environment could be a sweatshop or boiler room, whatever term best describes the type of company in the marketplace that usually exploits creatives.
I usually take Glassdoor reviews with a grain of salt and read between the lines. Sure there are good companies that have a few upset former employees, but with those, you will see several different stars (1,2,3,4,5), across the board. The red flag in my opinion here was mostly just 1-star and 5-star reviews. This signals to me that the 1 stars could be accurate and the 5 stars could be management manipulating employees to post 5-star reviews in order to lift their average. I worked at one of these types of companies before. Like clockwork, after another bad review appeared, that other company’s owner went around the office to pressure employees to leave a 5-star review. That owner also pressured me to try to contact Glassdoor to get the bad reviews removed. I told him it was impossible, but he would just scream like a toddler.
So for this company to share with me that they are hiring a specialist to “fix” the Glassdoor profile instead of, here’s a thought, treating employees kindly and professionally and you will get good organic reviews, it lets me know the type of company I believe I am looking at and for me, it’s a definite pass. I backed out before were got to any offer stage.
By the way, they never did send me the test project. I think they knew that I knew what was up and decided to keep looking for candidates who are less savvy than I am.
