Workplace reviews and discussion: 艾佳清潔有限公司

1. During the interview, HR provided a glass of negative-ion mineral water.

1. After that, I never got to drink it again, so there was no way to have it with the pie the executives were offering.

2. At the beginning of the interview, the senior manager said there would be two weeks of pre-employment training, after which we could develop through our own sales strengths once we had a solid foundation. However, during those first two weeks, I found that it was all just sales scripts. We had to stay for eight full hours a day, but the actual teaching took less than one hour; we were left to kill time on our own for the rest of the day. It was a huge waste of time.

3. The initial training was fundamentally hollow. The consequences of rushing new hires into the job were fully reflected in the results. The company would tell you to practice independently and discourage you from asking experienced senior colleagues for advice. Then, when you failed to meet your targets, management would evaluate whether you were qualified to continue, making new hires feel that being allowed to stay was a favor from the company and that they needed to work harder.

4. Once you really start working, you will find that the pay is very meager. Basically, this is a highly profitable industry, but the sales commission is small. In addition, being late or forgetting to report something would result in NT$5,000 being deducted from that week's marketing bonus. Supervisors would also encourage you to work on weekday evenings and holidays to achieve results, without overtime pay. Even on days when no clients were scheduled, you still had to go to the office and practice with yourself. This was quite a waste of time and completely restricted the sales staff's freedom. In practice, this worked out to only two or three days off per month.

5. The company's senior managers like sycophants. Even if their sales results were zero, as long as they performed the act of practicing with themselves in the office all day for the managers to watch, the managers would protect them, because the company needs people who are constantly improving. Even high-performing sales staff would become targets of management's resentment as soon as they raised opinions about the company's rules.

Overall company atmosphere:

At first, they tell you that you will have complete freedom, and that if you work hard at the beginning of the month, you can rest later. All of this is false, because management will want to take a cut of your results, so you can only work harder. If you slack off even a little or want to take a break, you will instead become an outcast. As a result, many senior employees gradually slow down and do only the minimum, and the job is nowhere near as positive as it was portrayed during the interview.

Thoughts: If you are doing this short-term, I personally would not recommend staying for more than half a year, because you do not learn much from the work itself. Most of your time is tied up in the office, exhausting yourself. For the long term, it is not worth considering at all: there is no year-end bonus and no promotion system. It is simply physical labor; you work overtime on holidays and at night to earn sales results, but there is no overtime pay. Each month, employees with good sales results may go out for a meal, but listening to them share their experiences feels like attending a direct-selling convention. The boss feeds you empty promises. I heard that one of the meals was at Costco, which is pretty pathetic in itself (fortunately, I did not push myself to hit sales targets at the time). It is clearly an industry with room for development, yet the company has managed to develop it into a complete mess ^_^