When I first started at TMP, I loved everything about it. I was drawn in by the big-name clients, the freedom and sense of ownership, and the seemingly relaxed culture. It took me about three months to get out of this honeymoon phase and see the issues that plague the company.
Ever since I joined the company, the Inbound/Content Marketing team has had a revolving door – people constantly moving from our team to other teams in the company or to new companies entirely. This meant our team suffered from a continual stress of training new people, taking on more work to “cover” the people who were leaving and being understaffed 98% of the time. People are leaving for myriad reasons, but it all comes down to the fact that TMP doesn’t value its people. Ironic, given the company’s entire business is based on talent acquisitions.
The content team is by far the bottom of the company hierarchy, only ever seen as an add-on bonus to other product offerings, rather than a valuable asset in itself. Despite what management may tell the content team, the general lack of respect for the team seeps out in more ways than I can count.
Content team members make less than half what people on the accounts side make, even though we were originally client-facing and doing similar types of project management as account services. It’s also hilarious, because management (and the job postings) will tell you a benefit to working at TMP is having a competitive salary which is congruent with industry averages. Spend five minutes on Monster or Glassdoor looking at average salary calculators, and you’ll learn that the average salary for someone doing a similar role in content marketing in Chicago is substantially higher than what TMP offers.
The salary might not be that big of a deal if other things in the company made up for it, but they don’t. Content team members are expected to work hours that are far beyond what the pay denotes and are already overloaded with an unacceptable workload. Each manager on the team is given hours beyond 40 hours/week, because they can supposedly farm out a chunk of the work to marketers on the team. What management continues to fail to acknowledge is that managers physically can’t delegate out an even or set amount of hours to marketers to keep their own workload manageable. Client work doesn’t operate that way. There is no way a marketer can undertake all of the work a manager needs to complete for a client, due to a consistent volume of emails and meetings, and the fact that some assignments can’t be explained or completed by someone who doesn’t have a full understanding of the client. Not to mention management does not hold marketers accountable for mistakes, so when mistakes continually occur, the manager is the one left to correct the work.
If the work we suggest to our clients isn’t enough to keep us overwhelmed, account teams and management constantly promise content services to clients without first consulting the content team, leaving the content team to deliver services that are unfeasible, lacking in strategic direction and often with an unacceptable turnaround time. Content team members become less of strategic content consultants, and more of kids with keyboards, executing deliverables exactly as they are told by account teams.
The content team has recently experienced a restructuring that is supposedly designed to help the above problem, but all it has done is make things far worse. The content team used to own strategies and client communication related to content, but now, the content team has been pushed together with other “support” teams (funny how the lack of respect comes out just with how they refer to our teams) and denied any client-facing interaction. And guess who is taking over all the duties we were once responsible for? Bingo. Account teams, who know nothing about what we do and yet are expected to present and speak to our strategies. The worst part is that when we voiced our concerns about these changes, no one took notice nor had concrete answers to any of the questions we raised. That’s a really great way to roll out an entirely new structure – go TMP.
On top of it all, the benefits we once had are now nonexistent. When I joined TMP, the VP of Content Marketing understood that our pay was not sustainable and thus attempted to give us other perks. We had insanely flexible work-from-home privileges, the ability to set our own hours and the opportunity to collaborate and create the rules that affected our team. After this boss was fired, they passed by a person on our team who was training for the position and instead brought in a new boss who is a complete tyrant, micromanaging every piece of work we complete, mandating new rules without discussing them with us first and taking away the things we actually liked about our team. Queue eight people on our team leaving THIS YEAR ALONE.
If none of that was enough to convince you NOT to work at this company, the one thing you should know about this company is that selfishness runs deep. I have never met more people solely concerned with their own well-being. People will say anything to you to get you to do what they want and will never be there to back you up in the face of adversity. Plus, they’ll belittle you and degrade you in the process. The amount of internal competition is astounding, given we all have the overarching same goals for our clients. But, if a client gets upset about something, you can bet your account team will blame it on you. Plus, if you join the content team, you’ll have a boss who constantly likes to remind you how busy she is or how many meetings she has. This means she will push internal work onto your already full plate because she herself is “too busy” and will never be around for you to ask questions. But you’ll be expected to stay as late as it takes to meet her irrelevant deadlines, and it shouldn’t matter, because “what else do you possibly have to do outside of work?” (her words, not mine).
If you’re considering joining the team, DON’T. You’ll thank me later.
