Workplace reviews and discussion: 北美國際進口商有限公司

If you just want to earn some money and can accept a job that consists of endlessly copying and pasting and sending hundreds of outreach emails, then you could consider working as a Marketing and Trade Assistant. The base salary is NT$33,000; if you successfully recruit members, you get an additional NT$1,000 for each of the first two, and it doubles starting with the third.

The company’s policies are normal and comply with the Labor Standards Act. There is not much overtime; at most, I have seen coworkers work one extra hour.

The workplace is in Hall 1 of the Taipei World Trade Center.

Occasionally, coworkers play pop music in the office.

During the interview, the manager said that we would not be under performance pressure and that the company was not results-oriented.

If you followed the steps and made the effort to send the emails, but the client ultimately did not want to sign up as a member, that was supposedly fine.

But in reality, the pressure was not about the results—it was about sending emails in the first place.

The vendor list was compiled by randomly searching the Alibaba website.

Any industry was acceptable; as long as there was a company name and an email address to which an outreach email could be sent, that was enough.

The requirement was to receive at least 150 vendor replies per month, which worked out to about 7 per day or 35 per week.

That meant sending templated outreach emails by copying and pasting, relying on luck every day.

The supervisors believed that the more emails you sent, the more likely you were to receive replies (OS: that’s clearly not necessarily true).

Some coworkers were lucky and received 7–8 replies after sending only 50–60 emails, while a new coworker sent more than 100 and received only 2–3 replies.

Then, before the end of each workday, everyone would have a one-hour meeting with the boss and manager.

They would ask how many emails you had sent and how many replies you had received that day. If you had received too few replies, they would ask why there were so few.

(OS: Whether vendors reply to our canned outreach emails is completely a matter of luck, isn’t it?!?! )

They would also repeatedly insist that so-and-so had a certain response rate and ask why you did not.

So there was no time during the day to finish your work and take a break; it was an endless email-sending hell.

After sending one email, you sent the next. If a vendor replied, you moved on to the next step and sent a second type of email.

That was also a templated email—you just copied and pasted the vendor’s name and email address.

In addition, the new Foxmail mailbox the company set up for you was easily locked.

Because you sent hundreds of emails every day, the account would be identified as spam or a Trojan program.

As a result, the recipient’s email system—whether Foxmail or Gmail—would block you, making it impossible to send emails.

The company’s only IT colleague apparently could not solve the problem either, and would only tell you to stagger the sending frequency or wait a while before trying again.

If that still did not work, you would send from a QQ Mail account, or a supervisor would give you the mailbox of a former employee who had left the company to use.

If you can adapt to this dull and monotonous email-sending work, you might give it a try.

The department office was small, with seating for eight people in total. At work, hardly anyone talked.

All you heard all day was typing (because everyone was sending emails and copying and pasting).

Occasionally, people called mainland Chinese vendors to ask whether they had received the email or to follow up on progress.

Sometimes coworkers also played pop music (most of them were quite young).

But for me, this was actually more suffocating than the life of an ordinary busy office worker.

The work was extremely standardized and rigid; everyone did the same thing.

Coworkers also worked overtime because they had not received enough replies, so they had to stay and send more emails,

hoping the recipients would respond.

(OS: This is clearly a matter of luck!! Sending more does not mean you will definitely receive more replies.

Even the chance of getting a positive response from divination blocks at a temple is higher.)