Pros
You will meet some wonderful and highly talented people at the lower levels, and make some great friends! The workplace gossip is... unparalleled. If you enjoy slacking, you can get away with it for a pretty long time before management does something about it. If you have bills or rent or a mortgage, you can pay them. That's kind of all you can pay though. Once you leave, you will meet fellow former employees and become instant friends. Ex-AB brunches will feel like a lovely day at the legion with your fellow veterans.
Cons
With overwhelming evidence that the business is a racket to ship students into Canada and leave them high and dry in a frightening cost of living crisis, you will need to perform Olympic feats of mental gymnastics in order to justify working there. As the government wakes up to the amount of fraud under their noses in the International Study Program, and ApplyBoard makes announcements and media appearances to position themselves as anti-fraud and compliance forward, you will burst a blood vessel. You will have certain, special sales managers question your intelligence and pick fights with you if you try to question the amount of fraud, or put a stop to it. Everything you put your time and work into will be shipped to India, where your complex workflow will be KPI-ified into meaningless clicks. The clicks will appear to have been done with a hammer, by a wombat, and cause errors that cost thousands of dollars. You and the customer both will be in awe that this is allowed to happen. Your manager will quietly agree with you and say that they can't do anything about it. You will meet new people in KW and they will ask you where you work, and you'll be embarrassed to tell them. You'll be promised, in no uncertain terms, that pay increases are coming. They will never materialize, and you will be left wondering if you're being punished, or if the company really is haemorrhaging money this badly. It is the latter. You'll read news articles and see with your own eyes the conditions that international students are facing. Crammed into classrooms, learning nothing relevant to the job market, sharing mattresses in an unventilated basement, lining up for jobs at the grocery store, taking transit with sunken, tired looking eyes. You'll wonder what they tell their mom about their time here, or if they can even be honest with her. You'll hear people blame them for the cost of housing. You'll think about your own time as a student, and how hard it was. It wasn't this hard though, was it? Did you have a bed of your own to sleep in when your shift delivering pizzas was over? Lastly, you'll be scared. Scared that you participated in something like this, and that really, anyone can be swindled into a bogus lie. Even RBC. You'll also be scared to speak out, unless you're in an anonymous forum like Glassdoor or Reddit. You'll cling to the comments on those platforms as proof that you are not insane.
