Vantaggi
Fast interview process, Off the 405
Svantaggi
I was hired by AVST at their headquarters in Bothell to be their first User Experience designer. I had just finished transitioning careers to UX Design, having come from a 3 year quality assurance role at Indeed.com. After several weeks of interviews and emails, they very quickly made me an offer and I filled out and signed all the necessary paperwork. On the first day, my boss was onboarding me. I told him that I was transgender and used gender-neutral pronouns. He grew very worried and asked that I not offend the other team members by sharing this information with them in any sort of email correspondence. He said that the office was very "conservative". A few hours later, he called me into his office, where HR was on speakerphone. I was fired on the spot. The reason they gave me was that their 3rd party employment verification agency couldn't verify my past employment at Indeed.com. They said that it was against company policy to revisit the issue, but they refused to share with the company policies they were referring to. I was forced to leave the building immediately. This was extremely upsetting to me, as the employment history I had provided was completely accurate. I tried to reach out to my ex-boss and HR at AVST to figure out a way to verify my employment, but they refused to answer any of my emails. I even had my former manager at Indeed.com write an email directly to them the same day, but we heard nothing back. You would think that with all the hours they put into hiring me, it would be worth it to all parties take 5 minutes to sit down with me and clear up the misunderstanding. AVST totally screwed me over. I had turned down several other jobs to accept this one, so I was now unemployed. The timing of being hired and then being fired on the first day of employment is very, very fishy when paired with my ex-boss' obvious discomfort with my gender identity. I am shocked that I am encountering this type of blatant discrimination in the tech industry in this day and age. I strongly caution against anyone applying here or using them as a communications vendor.