Long review since I've never before had so many thoughts and things that I feel like need to come to light about a job, especially for the sake of others and their future. Not to mention this job put me in the worst mental health of my entire life.
I was genuinely so excited to have this job initially, the pay was decent before inflation, the totally paid company car/gas is awesome, and from my interview experience TTI seemed like a company that had so many opportunities within it due to its size and rate of growth. I was lead to believe from the deliberately dishonest interview process that this job was going to have some office work/marketing analytical stuff from home while also being expected to cover multiple stores in a region and be in charge of coordinating events and trade shows for them, sounds pretty cool!
I was wrong, incredibly wrong. There is virtually no actual marketing aspects to this job, despite being called "Event Marketing Specialist". I can't be blamed for this, and you can't either. Because guess what? Through the 5 interviews they put me through they are deliberately vague and misleading with how they describe the job because they KNOW most grads absolutely wouldn't want to stoop so low to use their degree they worked tirelessly for to spend all day in a single home depot store downstocking and selling in-aisle. I didn't know that I was going to be in 1 store all the time until my first day on the job.
You can try to spin this position and pretend it has marketing aspects to it all you want, but it doesn't. YOU ARE A SALES ASSOCIATE. You are almost equal to a home depot associate but just get paid more. This company needs to change the title of this job because it's a joke what it actually is. Oh and also? Drop the degree requirement and stop kidding yourself. No one needs a bachelors to downstock and set up a table everyday. And when you tell others about how you have a bachelors/the job requires one, it just looks sad and is genuinely embarrassing.
TTI really needs to revamp their hiring, because every manager has a hiring quota they need to meet, they will hire just about anyone with very little criteria. That criteria usually being young, white, attractive and have SOME sort of degree (they don't care which, I've worked with people with criminal psychology degrees in a so called "marketing" position). Because of these things they put importance to, I have experienced an wildly mixed bag of coworkers. One of which, said my sales table "looked like ****" to my face on my 2nd week of working. Oh yeah, and this person got promoted to corporate marketing too.
Because of the way TTI is set up, they not only hire quantity over quality, but they also promote it too. Most sales managers within this company have had to sacrifice their integrity in some way, be it with faking sales successes, spamming TTI stuff on LinkedIn, or hurting home depot relationships by forcing TTI products in places where other companies PAID to be. Because of this, I've also had a mixed bag of managers too. I have a new manager almost every few months. My last manager loved to curse like a sailor, even in front of customers. On top of that, whenever my manager is needed, they are nowhere to be found and are incredibly hard to contact in a timely manner. When you do something right, it typically goes unnoticed, but when you start doing something wrong? Well, they never tell you in the moment, instead they allow you to keep doing it until they have a "case" built up to where they can spout out a bunch of days you messed up on and make it a much bigger deal, how are you supposed to learn from that?
In regards to leadership, many within the company see you strictly as a profit machine and not a human. This results in "store walks" almost always ending in scolding sessions that mainly focus on you not doing enough. As I continued to work for this company, I learned more and more that they see us as lesser than human. Such examples being, letting us know a week prior that we had to work at 5:30am on black Friday, lying to us about working way less weekends then we actually do, changing our start and end times for a week to accommodate for jet lagged big wigs that are walking the stores, and the list goes on.
Continuing on with leadership, I suggest you do some research on the CEO. Wall Street journal has an informative writeup on him.
Almost every major company has adapted to remote work and are more than likely going to adopt it. Unfortunately, TTI is still running on an incredibly archaic business model of forcing anyone who wants to promote to move to Anderson, South Carolina or Brookfield, Wisconsin. Fantastic places for young people! No one wants to drop everything and live there for a laughable 10-15% pay raise. Stop being cheap and close minded and either build more offices around the country, or get with the times and realize remote work works.
There is literally NO point to having a rep (or even 2) at the same store every single day. Reps from rival companies have their reps cover multiple stores and even allow them to do some office work from home. And guess what? They're also not called "Event Marketing Specialists" either.
Doing these so-called "events" 3 days a week every single week is a waste of time, almost no one wants to play with the tools or help you build something. This, among many other things such as lack of incentive in everyday sales, very little appreciation from managers and such makes the job be the most unfulfilling i have ever worked. So much so, that i actually spiraled into some of the worst depression I've ever had. There's nothing more defeating than being so happy to get your degree, all to have it be used for downstocking and asking customers if they'd like to buy a bit set with their tools.
Last but not least, the benefits of this job aside from the "free" truck and gas (which actually is factored into your W2 and results in you getting a terrible tax return if any) aren't great. The health insurance isn't bad but the mandatory life insurance they take out of your paycheck sucks, not to mention their PTO policy is absolutely abysmal, with sick time being included in your whopping 11 days of PTO you get in a year. Pretty crazy to think, but Home Depot has better benefits and shows much more appreciation for their employees than TTI.
Please continue to search on your job hunt. Don't settle for this job. You can do so much better and are worth so much more. Take all positive reviews that are not descriptive with a grain of salt (as managers are consistently told to leave obvious fake reviews to pump up the average review score), and take the negative reviews extremely seriously, as they're much more descriptive and personal.
