Meh - Anonymous employee GALE Partners Employee Review

"No"- Hamlet, Act III, Scene III, Line 92. Who knew that Shakespeare, a 16th century poet, would accurately predict what my experience at GALE would be? Phew. Thanks, Shakespeare. Clearly, I should be reading your work more. Moving on, for the purpose of the review, I will preface by saying that while at GALE, my experiences are my own and doesn't reflect other people's. They may feel differently than me.Some people may say that it's the greatest place to work in. (Though with the multitude of angry statements from other reviewers, this is unlikely.) You know that feeling when you wake up in the morning needing to go to the bathroom but you’re too lazy to get up? So you ended up rolling under your blanket hoping that the painful sensation will pass? And when you finally drag yourself and go to the washroom, you ended up feeling so good that you wonder why you haven’t done this earlier? That’s basically how I would describe my experience with GALE- From the beginning to my exit. Not the bodily functions part, but the whole emotional roller coaster part. (And yes, before you start objecting to this, waking up needing to go to the bathroom is an extremely distressful emotional roller coaster). I wouldn't exaggerate and say that working at GALE was worse than being unemployed. Because let's be real, there's nothing worse than being unemployed. And if you're a junior person with little experience or have bills to pay off (Basically, 95% of adults), this can be an okay place to work for a while and gain experience before moving to a better opportunity. With every job, there are always ups and downs. My series of 'ups' are probably meeting some of the most intelligent and wonderful co-workers who worked there. My series of 'downs' are probably meeting some of the most incompetent and shady management who worked there. Management in the department I worked in are incompetent and often promotes disreputable/ band-aid practices while shutting down other ideas. I've seen so many suggestions for process improvements being shut down over and over or being put in the back burner. At the same time, there were a lot of micro-management and lack of accountability. Something goes wrong? Just blame another person and roll your eyes. Or worse, I've seen management try to take credit for something that was done by others. Mentoring was non-existent in the place. Though with the level of knowledge that the people leading the departments have, you're probably better off not learning anything from them. And no, I'm not saying this because I think I would be better at leading the department. Looking at you, certain someone. There's a severe lack of HR in the company. The only thing the career/ professional development coach does in his session is read a list of pre-determined generic questions and typing your responses. (Which made me question the legitimacy of all those 'robots will take over our jobs' articles showing up on my LinkedIn dashboard. Clearly,this guy's job can be replaced by a survey tool. Your move, engineers). Turnover is extremely high, even for a marketing company. Two or three people would leave almost every month even after they received pay raises or bonuses which should raise some red flags for jobseekers. At one time, a whole department even left with a month. Despite this, the management still does a lot of finger pointing and blaming towards ex-employees. There are so many instances where I heard management saying how bad ex-employees are at their job when I've only heard praises when they worked there. Overall, if you're trying to get one foot in the business and this is the only option you have, then go ahead and take the experience. But if you have greater goals for yourself, then leave after 6-12 months. The people there may give you raises or fancier titles after a year in an effort to keep you. But as far as professional development and career satisfaction, there are far, far more better opportunities out there.