Good the bad and the ugly - Marketing Marcrist Employee Review

Products are good and the staff do care. Company was good about some unexpected time off I needed. No expectation to work after 5pm or from home. Refreshingly old school.

A disorientating place to work. The small marketing department is full of ghosts - systems set up by people long gone, equipment that no one is fully sure how to use. Was given no time to settle into the role before things started getting strange. Stopped being invited to meetings I should have been in, if not led (but could hear through the wall) -- humiliating and demoralising. Management will have website meetings without their webdev, content meetings without the content manager...accountability without responsibility is the name of the game at Marcrist. Two MDs who don't see eye to eye at all giving opposing instructions. Weeks were spent on individual posts - no sense of proportion or understanding of how marketing works. Points I tried to make one week would be repeated back to me weeks later. Constantly insulted, jokingly at first but developed an edge, for not knowing everything about diamond tools. Whim-based management. Confusing (lack of) corporate structure. Marketing team stationed in a windowless room, creating upstairs-downstairs dynamic. No one with the skill required to succeed will choose to work in marketing here.

The other side of the coin. I look at many review sites, these days, more for holidays, hotels and restaurants than jobs as I’m now retired, but do keep in touch with quite a few of my former colleagues who still work at Marcrist, and a few who don’t. I notice that on several job review sites three former Marcrist employees have given very negative feedback so let’s get some balance here. I worked at Marcrist for over 30 years, yes 30 years and several of my colleagues have worked there over 20 years. Now I can’t say that working at Marcrist is easy and I can say it’s a bit like marmite, you either like it or you don’t. I started there as a product specialist then sales manager followed by managing a department dealing with nuclear decommissioning, then product management, heading the marketing department and finally as the export manager dealing with customers from all over the world including many of the worlds top power tool companies. Unfortunately in 2010 I developed IPF, a lung disease that needed an urgent lung transplant. A few weeks after I was diagnosed I was given the opportunity by the Marcrist management to stop work, get as well as I could to enable the transplant consultants to put me on the transplant list. It took a year for that to happen ( please make sure your on the donor list and have spoken to your family about it) but thankfully I got the transplant I’d waited for and then spent five years recovering. All this time the company paid my salary for which I’m very grateful for without it life would have been very different. So if you work hard, like to succeed, and actually do your job to the best of your ability then Marcrist is a good place to work.

Work life balance can be difficult, but not impossible.