love it here! - Recensione dipendente - Social Media Coordinator presso Exclusive+PR

As an intern at a start-up company, there was a lot of work interns could do. Nothing was really off limits but some meetings, which led to great experiences. The CEO and Manager were super friendly and were always there if you needed anything.

The only con to the position was that it was unpaid, which was understandable given it is a start-up.

The workday starts at 10 am.

To begin, I worked at Exclusive for about a year and a half. Starting as an intern, moving to part-time, then eventually full-time after finishing my undergrad. Two months in, I was diagnosed with a disability that put me in and out of the hospital and resulted in two surgeries. I switched back to part-time to prepare for my next surgery and following the switch, I started to be completely shut out of the company. The boss/owner would ignore me, onboard new clients without informing me, and blame me for issues that arose while I was in the hospital. After a few weeks of hearing the owner gossip about me with other employees, she let me go claiming, “We didn’t have enough clients”. We had more clients than ever and I had the same 3 clients I had always had since I began my job. This was an excuse. Was it really because of my health issues? I’ll leave that up to you to decide. Mind you, I was the reason Exclusive’s social media service became what it was, I completely changed the department and I was her team leader. She stated to me on multiple occasions that I was so important to her and that I was a driving force in her company. To be let go because we didn’t have enough clients was a complete lie. It was because I was ill and she didn’t want to deal with it. The owner of Exclusive claims to want to “help young women in the PR world, teach them about the profession, and give them a leg up in the industry.” While if you intern you will certainly get lots of hands-on experience, all interns are unpaid. This is how she can run her business with such a small amount of clients and such a terrible client retention rate. She has minimal staff and unpaid workers. The work environment is extremely toxic and manipulative, the boss essentially wants you to be her best friend. She is always prying into your personal life, asking you extremely personal questions, wanting to know all about your significant others, your relationship with your parents, etc. If you don’t share with her she will feel like you’re “weird” and “not a team player”. She then overshares her own personal details. A lot that just feels like a ploy for attention and sympathy, discussing her home life, family, even her marriage, things that none of us wanted to be privy to. Despite claiming to be a feminist, the owner is extremely judgemental about appearance. On multiple occasions, she made comments about me or my coworker’s weight, outfits, or makeup. She would criticize us for not wearing makeup and gossip about us to those who did. Instead of addressing her preferences directly, she preferred backhanded remarks. To that extent, she would also on multiple occasions, brag about how much money she had and makes. She would say, “Gosh I didn’t even know there was that much money in my bank account.” Exclusive is just kind of a scam. She charges an inordinate amount of money to these clients to get them PR, almost the same as large companies in Chicago like Edelman or Lobeline, and our boss is barely involved. (Mind you, companies like Edelman charge that amount of money and each client has a whole team of people managing that account, at Exclusive 7 clients are managed by one employee). Her team (or intern) does everything, we would come up with ideas, execute them, and do all of our work without her. She would only get heavily involved when a client would reach out to her directly. With clients specifically, she was also extremely rude, at times I was really uncomfortable and concerned in meetings with the way she would talk to her paying clients. She would be aggressive, extremely condescending, and just mean for no reason. Her lack of respect was extremely evident and with my clients specifically, I always felt embarrassed that she would speak that way. In addition to acting out against clients, there was a lot of micro-aggressions to her employees as well. The things that stand out are her discriminating against an employee saying she can’t do certain things because “English isn’t her first language” English was her first language, she just happened to be a person of color. Similarly to this, she would act weird with me specifically with subjects relating to the LGBTQ+ community. She would gossip about me, saying things like “I don’t know if this employee is even comfortable discussing being a part of the community but she is and so she can do this.” And finally, she would claim one of her employees has autism and gossip with her employees about it, wanting to know if she seemed autistic to us too, she would say, “She just like super autistic, like the way she acts.” In addition to having biases against certain groups and letting them affect her employees, she would also on multiple occasions in meetings with colleagues or even clients state “her employees were just too young.” She would say in meetings, either where we could hear her or where we were in the meetings with her, that her “team is too young and can’t do certain things” & “my team is so young and unprofessional they just have a lot to learn”. She never brings this up to us outside of these meetings and gives us this supposed information we “need to learn”. The owner has absolutely no sense of work-life balance. She would text me and my coworkers on our days off or the weekends expecting things to get done. In one instance she threatened to write me up to another employee because I didn’t respond to her texts on my day off. Nowhere in my contract does it say I need to be available on my days off. Always expect to use your own devices and your own assets because she will not provide you with anything. All work needs to be done on your personal computer or phone, and no compensation is offered for this. Oftentimes the wifi would go out at our office and she made us use our own personal hotspots to continue work. One of the worst things she does is she never gives out paystubs. To even ask for them is a big deal to her. If you ask for your paystubs you have to have a really good reason or she’s not going to give them to you or she withholds them for some time. I once asked for them for a school thing and she said “It wasn’t a priority and we’ll deal with it later.” And finally. One of the more crazier and bizarre things that I experienced at Exclusive was when she was absent for a while for personal problems and in response to her employees needing her assistance with management-type things she literally told us, “I do not want to hear about any HR problems unless you’re being sexually harassed.” Update: Following being let go, she told me I would be receiving a severance check as well. She stiffed me on the check. It was a fraction of what she claimed it would be. Be warned. Please note: I'm just stating what happened and what I observed. Nothing about this has malicious intent, I just want those concerned to be aware.