阿貝思科技股份有限公司

First, there was a written test. After filling in the information, I was interviewed together by the boss, HR, and the sales manager. The interview was conducted entirely in spoken English. I first introduced myself, and they then asked about my previous work experience and why I had left my previous job. I found both the written test and interview relaxed and pleasant. At the end, they showed me around the company to familiarize me with the environment. It was a small company with fewer than 20 employees. The overall environment was clean and made full use of every available space.

After I was actually hired and started working, I discovered that the sales manager was extremely controlling about the details of internal documents and very hostile. The probationary period was three months, and she required us to write a reflection report every day. In addition, we had to enter the key points learned each day into OPEN NOTE for organization, on top of my own handwritten notes, meaning there were three sets of records every day. To me, this was redundant work and a waste of time and effort; keeping just one record would have been enough. Every day, the manager would occasionally send a bunch of links via SKYPE, saying that they were important points or shortcuts, and tell you to look at them yourself. With nearly 20 years of foreign-trade experience, I focus on achieving practical sales targets rather than emphasizing these internal document procedures and constantly creating or modifying documents. It is no wonder that the company's performance has remained stuck at the level of several years ago and has been unable to move forward, because 80% of the time is spent on internal document procedures instead of researching the market and the broader environment. I got along fairly well with the boss and colleagues from other departments, but all the department heads had also been replaced three months earlier (I had not yet had time to find out why), so there were serious gaps in work-related information. I could not get along with the sales manager (her). After two weeks of work, I genuinely felt that I could not stay. I told her directly that the main reason was that we could not work together because we were on completely different wavelengths, so I had to resign.

Although it was a probationary period, there were still work tasks that had to be handled immediately during working hours. Since I was not yet familiar with the company's computer files and products, I needed to spend some time searching for and organizing information in order to complete the work. This was something I was capable of handling, given my extensive foreign-trade experience. However, that manager's cutting remarks and hostility, along with her insistence on having people make piles of notes—and her constant nitpicking over the contents of those notes—made it impossible for me to endure even one more minute.