Have you ever seen the show Better Off Ted? Where the employer Veridian Dynamics is the worst kind of money hungry, villainous, corporation with ridiculous internal bureaucracy where secret hazardous employee experiments take place. Equifax Workforce Solutions is like that without the situational humor. Working there was a daily exercise in torture made bearable only by the company of the other prisoners.
In all seriousness, this place is the absolute worst. I came from TALX which I once thought of as an evil corporation. How wrong I was. After Equifax purchased TAlX they systematically changed everything good about the company so that by the time 10 years had passed we were but unrecognizable hulls of what once were talented, ambitious, caring human beings that provided useful and valuable solutions to our clients.
The newest leadership team took a successful company (albeit technologically outdated and stale) and exorcised every single thing that made working under the banner of the beast worthwhile. The “R’s” in the ivory tower made clear that despite numerous years of year over year success and sales increases that the rank and file would be held to even more ridiculous standards. Standards that were never put in writing, often not even shared verbally until halfway through the year, and retroactive to the beginning of the performance period. The way in which this billion dollar company conducts business technologically, operationally, and from an infrastructure standpoint is as if someone has placed a very expensive elephant on top of a house of cards that is supported by a tire fire suspended above a lake of monkey poo. If that didn’t make sense, you are starting to get what it’s like to work there.
Besides the nightmare of reporting to levels management that are often incapable of coherent cogent sentences much less effective management, the solutions themselves are Ford Pintos that cost Porsche prices. Also, they don’t work very well, are supported by layers of stagnant and incompetent support, and in some cases are sold as comprehensive compliance solutions that are later revealed to be incomplete vestiges of what was actually marketed (read: bait and switch). That leads me to the breach.
The best I have to say about that is that it can happen to any company. The worst I have to say about that is that the layers of arrogance surrounding the “incident” are as profoundly concerning as the event itself. The fact that criminal charges have only been filed against one person is testimony to the deep layers of political corruption that only a century old company can achieve.
As a final note, I obviously discourage you from working for this barely held together carnival of deceit. But if you, like myself for 10+ years, are desperate enough to accept the blood money here are some tips: don’t try to exceed-it won’t accomplish anything, don’t ever go to HR you will regret it, don’t ever stop looking for a new job, don’t ever look one of the “R’s” directly in the eyes-you will suffer physical pain.
And as a special post script, of you are considering doing business with EWS, don’t. Maybe just use them to get the price you want from their closest competitor.
