JOB OFFER feedback, please!Author: guywhoneedsadvice Date: June 14, 2003 11:40 PM EST I graduated from an Ivy League school with a major in economics. I was offered an analyst position in the NYC office of Accenture for 40K and nothing else. Is this a bad offer?
That was the nervous message put out on the Internet last summer by an Ivy League graduate who was uncertain about his job offer from Accenture, the well-known global management consulting firm.
To check out Accenture, he had gone to vault.com, a popular Web site that operates message boards for employees of a long list of U.S. and international companies. The message boards, which are not controlled by the firms involved, allow employees to vent and otherwise express their feelings about their jobs.
Vent is the operative word. The consensus of replies to the young man’s question about his salary offer from Accenture seemed to indicate that the company’s workers suffer under conditions of low morale, insane hours and little chance for advancement. For example:
A better opportunityAuthor: Partnerguy Date: June 16, 2003 8:05 AM EST I hear that panhandlers make a very tidy sum these days. In the summer you have a bonus of being outdoors, with all the pretty girls on patrol. You should be able to pull down a century a day, tax-free.
And:
Did you take the offer, newbie uthor: punkkid Date: June 18, 2003 1:08 PM EST At one time Accenture paid top $$ to compete for the best people. Now I think our strategy is to try to low-ball qualified people who can’t refuse. I joined from college at 62K + 5K bonus. Now I am hearing offers as low as 32K. . .Before you join, think about that strategy and what it does to the morale and loyalty of your co-workers and the long-term stability of the company. Think about what a strategy like this might indicate about the vision and incentives of the management.
In the face of such negative replies, the Ivy Leaguer posted the following SOS on the very same vault.com:
After reading this ENORMOUS Accenture message board, I am scared out of my mind. Accenture is my only job offer and I don’t know what to do. I’m an economics major who was offered 40K in the NYC office. I have little programming experience–Will I become a “code monkey?”
His fear of becoming a code monkey–tech slang for an underpaid, overworked software programmer–was, some people wrote reassuringly, a hasty conclusion.
It’s not the end of the worldAuthor:NYSrCons 9:40 AM EST It’s VERY rough out there finding jobs, especially for entry-level work….Many people end up taking their first jobs out of college off their resumes once they get into career jobs somewhere. $40K is actually more than most college grads make these days.
Some stuck up staunchly for the firm, blasting its critics as underachieving complainers. Of course, these could have been disguised messages from the CEO–everyone is anonymous on the Vault. Others roundly bashed the company, spewing frustration with abandon. Still others simply offered practical tips for how the young grad might find a cheap apartment in Brooklyn rather than renting in pricey Manhattan.
Then came a comment that may well have sent our prospective new hire into an emotional tailspin:
WrongAuthor: amsterdamned Date: Jun 19, 2003 5:49 AM EST Everyone hired during the lucrative times has either left, been fired, is still there and bitter, or is a cash out partner. People joining Accenture now are–simply speaking–‘mediocre’ hires. . . .If you accept an offer at Accenture nowadays you are basically admitting your own mediocrity.
Since 1999, the Vault’s message boards have been one of the Internet’s prime go-to sites for business gossip. The message boards function as an on-line water cooler of sorts–the Website even describes itself that way–where, under the cloak of anonymity, people exchange candid and often caustic comments about their employers, fellow employees, trends in the limping economy and the effect it has had on their mental state.
Sites like vault.com–Yahoo and wetfeet.com also offer similar services–lie at the intersection of a persistently tight job market and the increasingly refined technology of the Internet, where stressed-out employees and job-seekers can commune.
“One of the things that a place like the Vault can do is give people the opportunity to mollify some of their anxiety,” says Russ Roberts, an adjunct professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “With anxiety and mistrust, people are going to the Vault to get connected to people who have no reason to lie.”
The paranoia has followed continued waves of layoffs, salary reductions, cuts in benefits and the trend of “outsourcing” jobs to places like India. Roberts says that when business leaders speak to his students, their message of “things aren’t so bad” is met with skepticism. The reality, Roberts says, is that the skepticism is justified and students know it.
“We have had three successive years of catastrophic recruiting situations,” says Roberts. “We have a bunch of kids who are 21 to 25 who are lost as to what to do. We have people going to the best schools in the country, graduating and applying for jobs as baristas at Starbucks.”
Those seeking jobs have grown frustrated with corporate recruiters who paint rosy pictures of the job market, say the experts. Those with the jobs are tense–many suffering from survivor’s guilt after watching their co-workers get the axe–and are fed up with the corporate-friendly spin that company communications contain.
People want the inside story and unvarnished opinions, and fans of sites like vault.com say that’s what the boards provide.
Consider this comment off the IBM message board.
IBM wants mediocrityAuthor: tampa(underscore)L&KerDate: Jul 21, 2003 9:02 PM ESTIf you’re interested in IBM and how they make business decisions [and] how they treat their employees . . read the IBM Business Consulting Services message board. Here you’ll find out the truth.
Vault users speak about the boards being liberating–in some ways a true form of democracy where you can talk freely, agree, disagree and share information. The days of the big company hoarding all information, they say, is over. The on-line message boards make rumors and rumblings open for anyone with a modem to see, and they are a way to pull the curtain back on a company’s Oz-like inner workings.
“It’s the purest use of the Internet out there,” says Jon Warshawsky, formerly of Accenture and now a manager with Deloitte Consulting. “I trust it more than a Fortune article on what a place is like to work in. I’m a big believer in talking to front-line consultants.”
The most popular message boards relate to companies in consulting, investment banking and law, but a wide range of industries and business are represented on the sites, particularly on vault.com. There are nearly 1.2 million messages on the Vault, although the site’s overseers recently began steering visitors to join the site as “gold members,” at $3.95 per month, by restricting freely viewable messages to those less than 60 days old.
On the message board devoted to Chicago-based Bank One, disgruntled employees compare speaking with people in human relations to talking to “wallpaper.” The board for Campbell Soup Co. contains bitter jabs about upper management. On the site for Ford Motor Co. you can read several years worth of spirited exchanges over how the company treats its employees, the quality of its cars and its viability as a long-term employer.
For people who feel claustrophobic in their jobs and are on constant pins and needles over layoffs, the message boards are a place to both let off steam and connect with a community of people who know your pain.
There is a particularly exhilarating quality to ditching your at-work identity at the close of business and donning an altogether different persona on-line, says Emily Ignacio, an assistant professor of sociology at Loyola University in Chicago.
“In companies, your identity is constantly checked,” she says. “You have ID badges, user names, passwords. These places (message boards) allow people freedom–a freedom that they normally don’t have.”
That freedom allows people to ask questions that they would never normally ask during a job interview. Salary discussions dominate many boards, but other questions are asked about how a company treats openly gay employees and what the actual upper-management promotional opportunities are for women.
Other discussions can be dicier. An exchange from the board devoted to financial services company Morgan Stanley, for example, contains a conversation between employees on the topic of the company’s drug-testing policy.
Taking place between four people, the following comments were posted over nearly two months.
any information uthor: alig2Date: May 1, 2003 1:33 PM ESTwanted to know if anyone knows anything about MS’s drug-testing policy. is it a hair test or urine?
infoAuthor: midtownempDate: May 8, 2003 8:55 PM ESTurine test, not much supervision at all, i easily passed it by using an additive.
Drug TestingAuthor: SteveSFDate: Jun 13, 2003 12:08 PM ESTI really hate to say this, dude, but hey, if you have to ask that question then what you should really do is pick another career. Mcdonalds maybe?
drug testingAuthor: demandredDate: Jun 24, 2003 10:23 PM ESTthey do not test as far as i know. i just got laid off from that place and i never got tested. i would have been gone if they did, and so would 3/4 of the people that i know.
What is fact and what is fiction on sites like vault.com is as hard to determine as whether the correspondents actually are who they say they are. Nor is it all unexpurgated. The Vault advises users that its guidelines prohibit obscene material or personally damaging remarks, and it says it monitors the site for violations.
Still, advocates of the Vault’s boards maintain that while exaggerations appear and inaccuracies are inevitable, the truth comes out. If you read enough messages, ignoring both the very hostile and the overly bland, you get, they say, a snapshot of what’s really happening inside a company.
“I think it’s a great resource,” says Jill Thompson, a human relations manager with job placement firm Dickson Allan. “I think it’s always great to talk to people, but like in everything you have to weigh how much credibility they have.”
Thompson says the trick is developing a knack for reading between the lines. She says it’s important to also understand that you’re going to find comments from people who’ve had a good experience and people who’ve had a bad experience at a given company. Each offers different perspectives.
But the severest critics say that the “fatal” flaw of vault.com’s message boards is they’re so clogged with negativity that it’s impossible to gain any sort of a balanced view.
“My policy is to ignore it,” says Jim Carty, U.S. director of human resources for Deloitte Consulting. “The bulk of it is junk. It’s just a newer form of the rumor mill. There’s always people who talk around the water cooler, but that’s how it is.”
Carty says that while he loves the idea of the Vault’s message boards and thinks they have real potential for good, what he’s seen on the Vault has been overwhelmingly inaccurate. That, says Carty, plus the anonymity that makes it impossible to assess a writer’s credibility, causes him to put no stock in them.
For pure entertainment value, however, it’s hard to beat the Vault’s message boards. At the board for housewares giant Home Depot, for example, a verbal brawl broke out that Jerry Springer would have been proud to air.
The issue was managers allegedly dipping into the petty cash fund. Part of it went like this:
Managers crap on usAuthor: kuiamaDate: Jun 12, 2003 6:29 PM ESTAny time there is a manager or district manager meeting in our store they take money out of petty cash to buy lunch for the managers. God knows why we are dipping into our profit margin to feed overpaid managers is beyond me. But, the real insult comes after the meeting is over. Once the managers have stopped gorging themselves with company money, they put the leftovers in the break room for the hourly associates to pick through. I feel like a medieval serf being tossed the scraps from the king’s own table.
These fighting words drew the ire of a Home Depot manager’s wife, who rolled up her sleeves and typed in a defense of her husband’s honor.
open your eyes, close your big mouthAuthor: HDwifeDate: Jun 15, 2003 12:49 AM ESTGuess what? That lunch those “overpaid” mgrs eat is usually the only one in a week. They don’t have the time. My husband is a store mgr and he is nothing CLOSE to overpaid. If we work out his hourly wage it is just depressing (he works his butt off–13-14 hour days are the usual)… You sound like a very bitter and resentful employee. Why don’t you do us all a favor and quit and go get a job at Lowe’s?
What’s true or false, fair or unfair, is certainly important, whether it’s an individual’s career at stake or an employer’s valuable reputation. But the experts say that companies today need to realize that the rules have changed when it comes to employees’ sharing information.
As long as there’s anxiety–something we’ve had no shortage of lately–people will need to talk. The easier it is to talk freely and openly, the wider the talk will spread.
Paul Woo, associate director of recruitment programs at the University of Chicago Law School, has seen law firms get extremely upset after being panned on vault.com’s message boards.
“For them, they don’t like it because it’s not positive that the information is out,” says Woo.
Some suggest that spreading rumors and letting them live permanently on-line just isn’t fair, but Woo says it’s something we all need to get used to.
“I don’t think it’s a question of fairness,” Woo says. “It’s reality. The Internet makes it so. If it’s not the Vault, it would be something else.”
