-SEO Scholars has a chaotic, "sink or swim" mentality, and I regret ever accepting an offer to work there. They have no meeting agendas for org wide meetings, and volunt-tell random staff to lead and facilitate staff meetings. When I tried to point this out there was no concern about it, since they're really only concerned about expanding, making more money, and looking good externally, but they put a super low value on employee experience and actual organizational infrastructure (hence the very high turnover rate...)
-There is no real HR, and it shows. HR in NY is understaffed, and they have no time for anything outside of compliance, hiring and firing people. A perfect case study in this is how I was treated by this organization. They hired me in August 2020, and for three months I worked tirelessly. My supervisor was inexperienced managing people, was not able to communicate directly and to invest in our working relationship and to set me up for success in the role. But like with any new job, I was giving it time. SEO Scholars did not.
-They waited until after I supported a highly successful virtual event, then abruptly fired me. The event was Thursday. On Friday I was thanked and told to sign off early at 3pm and enjoy the weekend. On Monday I log on and receive a $100 gift card and am thanked again. Then on Tuesday my supervisor says she wants to talk about a few pending projects/projects after the event, and to my surprise when I join the meeting the HR person is there (so I was lied to about the purpose of the meeting). They then tell me that for "performance related issues" I am terminated, effective immediately. They provide no further detail, even when I ask for it verbally and in writing on multiple occasions. Given their behavior in the days leading up to me being fired, they either made this decision very last minute, or were just being thoughtless and cruel about mixed signals, and i'm not sure which is worse.
-I was shocked and disgusted by how I was fired, since I was only there for three months, was just doing my job the entire time, and was never given the opportunity to actually perform all of the duties of my position by my distrusting and micromanaging supervisor, nor the chance to work on things if they weren't working, or even the information on specifically how they perceived it wasn't working. I actually conferred with a friend who is an employment attorney, and only then did I find out that by law they are required to provide your full personnel file if you request it within 30 days. So I had to email HR and cite employment law for them to actually follow my request. And guess what? When I got everything back, there was not one single document testifying to or showing my work product whatsoever. They obviously never bothered with any sort of official process and looking into things, and instead just let me be scapegoated by a supervisor who was struggling to set clear expectations, train and support a new employee, and have the patience to work with a new person to improve things over time. She just preferred to fire me, and try someone else, rather than invest in the person they hired.
-When I was fired, the new new ED sent an email to the SEO Scholars staff saying I was leaving and that it was "mutually agreed upon" (another lie). For someone who claimed he was all about relationships and who I actually respected and trusted, that one was extra devastating. He was never once in a department, supervision, or any work related meeting with me to see my work firsthand, and he never once spoke to me about my performance. He didn't bother to join the meeting where I was fired, didn't send me an email, message or speak to me on the phone, nothing. This struck me as not only super unprofessional but disturbingly cold.
-In my experience, they are not able to train and properly onboard people, let alone provide professional development opportunities. When I was having an issue doing something with reports and I asked if we could have our consultant work with me, my supervisor said it was too expensive. I asked if she could show me how to do it (she had my job previously), and she said she didn't know how. But then when a mistake was made with an email using that report, and after I apologized profusely and figured out the source of the error, she passively aggressively just starting doing those things herself (so she obviously did know how, or someone did...), and never asked me to again, even though it was part of my job. I actually praised her for being understanding and fostering "psychological safety" to make mistakes, but now I know she probably held that against me to push me out.
-Everything I was told about my responsibilities would shift around depending on how my supervisor was feeling (she repeatedly kept doing things that were my job, promising she would transition me into things that she didn't, withholding my responsibilities from me, and overall not trusting me or allowing me to do my work. The work I did perform she would go over with a fine toothed comb and did not let me have any autonomy whatsoever; everything had to be exactly to her overly specific personal preferences and she was not able to really delegate or let go of control.
-She had no trust in me, and would often insist that I CC her on my internal and external emails. Once she actually edited an email to an external vendor I had a relationship with, to add a sentence about excitement for the event. In short, she didn't even trust me to write a professional email and express an appropriate tone. She was truly that controlling. But because she is effective with her work and NY and the SF board like her, they do not bother to look into how she works with others and specifically the people she supervises.
-By the way, this experience with poor supervision is by no means just related to me. One POC and her white supervisor had such bad rapport that I could visibly notice during teamwide meetings the tension in their relationship. Then I later found out that rather than support that supervisor to become a better supervisor and build an effective working relationship with that person, they just hoisted supervision onto a different POC employee who was new who could build rapport with her. And did he get a title change or compensation for this additional work not in his job description? Nope.
