This is a company that has no idea of the direction they intend to go. This company wants to run in 20 different directions all at once. Not a great place for someone who is a thinker and tends to have innovative and creative ideas. Ideas were constantly shut down by management. You would think they would embrace new ideas given that their whole ppc catalogue was severely flawed. For example, most of the portfolio had keywords and ads that said houses for sale when they ONLY rent out apartments.
This is not a place you would want to work if you prefer to have some kind of structure. The department is disorganized and chaotic. They do not have a centralized location to manage tasks and communication. Instead they have a ton of excel spreadsheets, Voxer (which wasn’t bad), they have like 40 or more teams channels (when I asked my manager which ones I need to keep up with I was told all of them), they use trello (something I suggested to centralize tasks and communication. I did not expect for it to just be one more thing to keep up with), they used Dropbox, of course they used emails, phone conversations and more. Due to this chaotic system it was easy for management to say they assigned work that was never actually assigned. They can easily say it was discussed on a phone conversation that never took place. It covers them but throws the employee under the bus.
There’s been times I would need to do my work 2 or 3 times because everyone had edit access to excel and someone would erase my work. This job offers NO training. They expect you to just come in and easily adapt to their disorganized chaos.
Let’s also talk about meetings! It is not uncommon for the director to announce a mandatory meeting at 4pm to be held at 5pm the same day and last up to 2-3 hours. In a lot of those meetings I had no idea what was even being discussed (hence the lack of any training). When I said I don’t know about any of this stuff, the response would be you’ll get it eventually. Eventually never came.
This company is the definition of micromanagement. It got to a point where I decided to show them how ridiculous they were being by providing them with a progress report daily. I thought they would have looked at it and realized that I was working hard and that they were being unreasonable in constantly checking on me. I was wrong. Instead it just became a requirement that I provide this report daily.
The sheer volume of work is ridiculous. I held a job that could have easily been split into 3-4 jobs. I was a ppc specialist, a seo specialist, social media specialist, data analyst, a strategist (all though none of my suggestions were ever appreciated), etc... This may not seem like a lot until you consider that they have over 60 locations and counting. To break this down, their PPC portfolio alone would contain about 50-60 campaigns. Each campaign had at least 3 ads per ad group. Some campaigns had more than one ad group. At any given moment they can say we want to run a new promo and need to change all the ads. That’s 150 - 200 ads that need to be changed right away. Updating that many ads by yourself can easily take a whole work day or 2. Sure they will say they will help. The times that help was offered, they bailed after doing just a few campaigns due to having other work to do. There was a time that I ended up working late to change the ads and even got up at 4am to complete the remaining ads. This extra work and dedication was overlooked and not appreciated at all.
I worked hard and at one point I was told regularly how good of a job I was doing. I was told “I don’t know what we would do with our you”. Of course all of that was just empty words because not even a month later I was fired and I was told how horrible of an employee I was. I was fired in the middle of a pandemic with a 7 month pregnant wife who was on my insurance along with my kids. I was thrown away like garbage and all the work I did for them didn’t matter anymore. They made it clear that I was nothing to them. No job should make their employees feel that way.
