Prior experience does not influence the salary you’ll be offered on commencement – and that salary is often around 20% lower than the market rate. When I met the CEO, he immediately began boasting about his refusal to offer pay rises to employees, and spoke contemptuously of past employees who have dared to ask for a pay rise that would have brought their salaries up to the national standard. In the next breath he hurriedly insisted that “we’ve done our market research, and we’re actually paying our employees at the market rate.” Cognitive dissonance is a powerful tool for the guilt-ridden and the shame-faced: he’d already admitted – just seconds earlier – to paying employees less than the market rates. He and his management team stressed several times during my interview that “we want employees who genuinely want to work with our company, not employees who’re just after the money.” Hmm. We were apparently expected to crawl around the feet of the management team, screaming with gratitude for them and their decision to allow us to accept employment at Frontier! In my case, I was desperate for a job and I did think that working at Frontier would look good on my resume, but the following few months were impossible to bear. The overburdened team I was put into did not want me there. I was not provided with any training and whenever I asked for additional work I’d be turned away – nobody was interested in training a new member of staff. I had to beg for work so that I did not spend the entire day staring vacantly at my monitor! And the office itself was horrid – it was filthy. The entire time I was working there, I was not provided with the equipment I needed to complete the work I had been hired to complete. I didn’t even have two functioning monitors, which is essential for most payroll officers. I was glad to leave!
