Reflection - Senior Consultant Mana Search Employee Review

Two years on from leaving Mana Search, I still think about that place more than I’d like to. Not because it was good, but because of how much damage it did. At the time, I tried to tell myself the chaos was normal. The late pay, the lack of respect, the behaviour from leadership that crossed so many lines. It wasn’t normal. It was a place that ran on fear and ego instead of honesty and trust. What still gets to me is how easily unacceptable behaviour was ignored. Things happened there that simply shouldn’t happen in any workplace. Good people were humiliated, spoken to appallingly, and made to feel small for caring or working hard. Seeing that kind of behaviour tolerated changes the way you see people in charge. It’s also telling when you look at the reviews online. You can see from what’s been written that this wasn’t an isolated experience. The negative reviews speak volumes, while the overly generic positive ones feel like attempts to cover it all up. It’s a pattern – an organisation desperate to control its image rather than fix its problems. In the end, I didn’t walk away. I was fired for little to no reason after putting up with far too much, and even then my final pay was delayed for two months. It was a fitting reflection of how that place operated – careless, disrespectful, and completely devoid of accountability. I stayed longer than I should have because I thought sticking it out showed resilience. But I’ve learned that real strength is knowing when something is broken beyond repair. If there’s one thing that whole experience taught me, it’s that a company’s values aren’t shown in what they post online or put in a pitch deck. They’re shown in how they treat people when no one’s watching. From looking at their LinkedIn today, it seems like a slow, painful decline is already happening – the kind that eventually catches up with places built on the wrong foundations. It’s not hard to see. I hope, one day, accountability finds its way there. Until then, I’m just glad to have survived it, learned from it, and built a career somewhere that treats people like humans, not disposable parts.