This is my story of how I landed unemployment soon after I became the envy of people around me on nailing my first job with Amazon after letting go half a dozen opportunities and losing just as many before.
I quit my first job a couple of months back on the pretext of exploring a career in civil services. I'm currently in the fourth month, of my first bout, of unemployment reading and watching sitcoms intermittently. I decided to describe my actual motive behind giving away my job in hope that it would teach someone how to make a decision or, maybe, how not to!
I must admit that I wasn't exactly happy with the terms of my contract- including but not limited to my role- as a recruiter. I was hired to work as a 'talent acquisition associate' with Amazon becoming, along with my friend, the first in the country to be hired on campus by Amazon into their recruitment team. Excited as I was, I was equally apprehensive about having to work on contract on the rolls of a third party with no clarity on the basis of absorption or the time lines, except vague assurances made during the pre-placement talk by the GM of HR. The compensation too was well below what other firms offered. I said whatever! and accepted the offer hoping to make the best out of it.
So I started working for Amazon. Before I go into the part where I disappoint with my observations, here's what I assumed about my job before signing up. I expected to work amongst the best people in the trade, who knew what they were doing and could any day help me out as I learned the trade, committed individuals working to their team's strengths to offer their best for the organization. I imagined systems to guide operations with men of integrity guarding them, avenues for growth and development.
So on my first day at work I found, to my rude shock, that while some recruiters could barely even speak English, only few even cared to. Nor did I understand how this was to happen at Amazon, a leader in the industry known for sky high hiring bar that only keeps climbing year after year. My initial observation and subsequent ones about the qualification of an average teammate made me think if I was hired for a job for which I didn't have to specialize. Sometimes it even made me think if I was only as good as the worst amongst them, if I was chosen to work as one among them; since I held no prior work experience I reasoned one will only have to be a little better than the worst already to be hired.
Simultaneously as I tried avoiding these questions trying to focus on the job at hand, I couldn't but make other observations like stagnant careers- which hadn't moved an inch in four years-, politics of favoritism, serious violations of established guidelines, dual standards in hiring- that explained the proliferation of mediocre hires hired to be subservient to individuals than be led by the principles of the organization-recruiters, arbitrary firing of employees who fell out of favor with the boss. And yes, the boss himself was another reason I saw no reason in continuing in the job, especially after it was becoming clear that he had the least intention to improve the condition of the team-whose morale by then was that of a bunch of convicts standing trial.
The team viewed as a panorama was people working to please their supervisors who in turn were doing the same to their bosses. This clearly was not what I'd signed up for. But most importantly it was an association built on false promises of career growth and development that I naively bought. So, it didn't make sense to me to cling on to a job for career's sake, which I doubted existed from the very beginning. I didn't like to get up to a workplace which I had come to openly dislike for most part. I decided I will not be wasting my time on something I didn't appreciate doing, because time is too precious a gift to be thrown away like that into a uninspiring job. Something that became too clear after a few youtube videos on motivation and Sean Penn's "Into the wild". That's how I got unemployed, that's my story of how I became something- 'something' yet to be ascertained!!!
I quit my first job a couple of months back on the pretext of exploring a career in civil services. I'm currently in the fourth month, of my first bout, of unemployment reading and watching sitcoms intermittently. I decided to describe my actual motive behind giving away my job in hope that it would teach someone how to make a decision or, maybe, how not to!
I must admit that I wasn't exactly happy with the terms of my contract- including but not limited to my role- as a recruiter. I was hired to work as a 'talent acquisition associate' with Amazon becoming, along with my friend, the first in the country to be hired on campus by Amazon into their recruitment team. Excited as I was, I was equally apprehensive about having to work on contract on the rolls of a third party with no clarity on the basis of absorption or the time lines, except vague assurances made during the pre-placement talk by the GM of HR. The compensation too was well below what other firms offered. I said whatever! and accepted the offer hoping to make the best out of it.
So I started working for Amazon. Before I go into the part where I disappoint with my observations, here's what I assumed about my job before signing up. I expected to work amongst the best people in the trade, who knew what they were doing and could any day help me out as I learned the trade, committed individuals working to their team's strengths to offer their best for the organization. I imagined systems to guide operations with men of integrity guarding them, avenues for growth and development.
So on my first day at work I found, to my rude shock, that while some recruiters could barely even speak English, only few even cared to. Nor did I understand how this was to happen at Amazon, a leader in the industry known for sky high hiring bar that only keeps climbing year after year. My initial observation and subsequent ones about the qualification of an average teammate made me think if I was hired for a job for which I didn't have to specialize. Sometimes it even made me think if I was only as good as the worst amongst them, if I was chosen to work as one among them; since I held no prior work experience I reasoned one will only have to be a little better than the worst already to be hired.
Simultaneously as I tried avoiding these questions trying to focus on the job at hand, I couldn't but make other observations like stagnant careers- which hadn't moved an inch in four years-, politics of favoritism, serious violations of established guidelines, dual standards in hiring- that explained the proliferation of mediocre hires hired to be subservient to individuals than be led by the principles of the organization-recruiters, arbitrary firing of employees who fell out of favor with the boss. And yes, the boss himself was another reason I saw no reason in continuing in the job, especially after it was becoming clear that he had the least intention to improve the condition of the team-whose morale by then was that of a bunch of convicts standing trial.
The team viewed as a panorama was people working to please their supervisors who in turn were doing the same to their bosses. This clearly was not what I'd signed up for. But most importantly it was an association built on false promises of career growth and development that I naively bought. So, it didn't make sense to me to cling on to a job for career's sake, which I doubted existed from the very beginning. I didn't like to get up to a workplace which I had come to openly dislike for most part. I decided I will not be wasting my time on something I didn't appreciate doing, because time is too precious a gift to be thrown away like that into a uninspiring job. Something that became too clear after a few youtube videos on motivation and Sean Penn's "Into the wild". That's how I got unemployed, that's my story of how I became something- 'something' yet to be ascertained!!!
2 comments:
nice!
Mysterious, people when they visit my blog are going to accuse you for keeping it alive!!! :)
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