Wasn't technically fired, but....

JerryC submitted 209 days ago

I was a Consultant and was told the project ended due to a reorganization (transfer of the division to another department that didn't budget for my role) by the guy who I reported to. I thought I was hired as a Consultant, but read on and you'll see otherwise. I actually sent this email to the recruiter who got me the job and she wanted to follow up with them on the issues I mentioned, but considering this was such a crap job and I didn't work there anymore, I decided not to pursue it.

All the projects I had worked on were at a Senior Accountant/Financial Analyst level. This project was 1-2 levels below that based on the total lack of difficulty of the work. The Manager clearly should have known that I was overqualified based on my experience from looking at my resume knowing what I would be doing. 95% of my time was spent running reports between 2 systems trying to figure out what transaction was missing among a few transactions.

They showed me how they printed out the 2 reports and crossed off the same numbers until they found the missing one. Based on my experience level, this was not what I was expecting to do. I didn't ask him during the interview about the difficulty of the work because I never had to before with any other hiring manager.

While I knew they were reconciling Mutual Fund accounts, I was never given a tangible goal upfront as to what the objective was. This way, say 6 months down the road, we can see where we are compared to where we started. I had a phone and obviously an email account, but never used them because I had no interaction with any other associates in the company other than the Manager and his staff.

The first two Fridays I worked here, I went to meetings with the Manager, his boss and staff and the IT Department to discuss what we were doing. After that, only he went and once in a while he would give us feedback, which was gathering us around his desk for a minute. We as a group never had a staff meeting in my time here. I mentioned to him 6 months ago we should and he thought it was a good idea, but never followed up on it.

Only a few times would he have questions/comments about the completed work I gave him. Only recently did he say that some of the issues I found were being looked into. It seemed like none of them were addressed as I saw the same differences appear on this error report months after I originally saw them. Considering none of the differences/issues were addressed a year later, I had to question where the urgency was to hire someone with my experience if no priority was being given.

I had to ask one of his staff a question when he was on vacation and was told "There's a lot of times when I don't know what I am doing or what is going on."

So, my days were mostly spent working in a very isolated manner, doing very basic work and not knowing what was going on. From what I learned, the Manager came from a Call Center area and was not an Accountant. Since this was the first project he managed, his inexperience was really frustrating. He made comments to me that left me speechless, like he never or barely looked at my resume.

After talking with the other person he hired, she said "XXXXX told me that I could apply to other jobs when I had downtime." When he was on vacation, she said that's all she did. While I myself had downtime too, I wasn't planning on sitting there all day and apply to jobs. During this time, I did set up a profile on the company website and applied to a job over the course of a few minutes. He must have been made aware of this and then sent me an email telling me not to apply during business hours, a direct and blatant disparity from what he told Jennifer. Being that they were both minorities and I wasn't, I clearly felt I was being discriminated against.

Unlike the two people he hired, who were unemployed and about to be unemployed, I did not apply to this and left my other consulting job because I was finding out once I completed the project and they offered me a job, the salary wasn't going to be sufficient. Even if I did get offered a job and turned it down, I could have stayed in the department as a consultant working on another project. So, I gave up something for what I thought was challenging that clearly wasn't. I was told by one of the Manager's staff he informed them of my pending status and then they asked me how I had been here a year and XXXX was only here a few months and they couldn't keep me but were keeping her. While I am clearly overqualified for this level of work, I did wonder that too. Even if I had come here from being unemployed, I still would have looked to move on to something else. The fact is I took this and now I am unemployed.

Right before I left, I came across something I thought I had corrected. I went back and checked it and I had submitted this to the Manager in April 2007. Then I saw a few other amounts that weren't corrected and ended up checking almost 1400 amounts I submitted to be corrected and only 75 were corrected with a lot of what wasn't from last year. Not pleased by this, I sent an email to the VP of the department asking him if bringing someone with my experience was because this was supposed to be a high priority, how much of a priority was it if 95% of what I did was for naught. At least I could have left feeling like I accomplished something, but felt like I accomplished next to nothing.

The bottom line was, this guy never comprehended for one second while I was there how overqualified, unchallgend and under utilized I was, telling me: "I guess this isn't what you want." This comment left me speechless.

I had a change of heart recently and contacted an attorney to see if the discrimination against me would be cause to bring charges against the Manager.

Thanks for letting me vent. Any comments are welcome.