The whole monstrosity is amateur hour. The agency at its core is a PR AGENCY, and no amount of industry jargon is going to change the way they function. “We’re in an integrated digital creative agency!” ...except we hire people as “social strategists” and have them doing 90% account services work. There’s nothing about the workload that is similar to what you’d be doing at an actual digital creative agency, and if you’ve ever worked at one before, you’ll feel 100% baited and switched once you figure things out here. Your unique skill set and expertise mean nothing—they literally throw bodies at projects just to tick the box on their list and move on.
And speaking of workload, if you’re under 150% allocated, consider yourself lucky. And if you flag to your manager that you’re spread way too thin, you’ll be chastised for “not managing your time well enough.” The best thing I heard while there was the time my manager had to talk to me because I was *just* at my target for billability. “Everyone else at your level is billing over 100%” is what I was told—as if that meant I wasn’t pulling my weight. If Associate Directors should be 90% billable (which, by the way, WHAT?!), we shouldn’t be praising the folks coming it at 100-120% billable—we should be SPREADING OUT THE WORK OR HIRING MORE PEOPLE so that everyone is meeting their targets. Isn’t that the point of having a target in the first place?
As I said at the beginning, Real Chemistry is truly a place you want to love. For the most part, the social team is made up of incredibly talented, smart, kind people who want to do good work and treat each other well. Unfortunately, there are a handful of rotten apples in legacy leadership who are spoiling the whole bunch. And what’s even more upsetting is that it’s a bunch of women who have worked hard to get to the top, which is something I generally love to see in a male-dominated industry. But instead of making space at the top and extending a hand down to other women to pull them up, these women are kicking their colleagues in the face to keep them down.
HR apologized to me upon my exit, saying that the people who I cited as reasons for my departure have been “common trends” in other exit interviews from the social team. They said they were sorry I had such a terrible time, and they wished they’d acted sooner on the feedback they’d gotten previously. They thanked me for my professionalism and respectfulness in light of how awfully I’d been treated, and acknowledged the transparency in my feedback truly was in an effort to make things better for the friends I was leaving behind. What’s disheartening to find out is that very little, if anything, has been done in the five or so weeks since I resigned. At least 6 people have quit since me, all from the social team.
While leadership was initially upset about the onslaught of negative Glassdoor reviews, it appears they’ve resolved themselves to the conclusion that they’ve all been penned by one author. That sucks, y’all. Do better. No one is spending their whole day writing countless Glassdoor reviews. We all have jobs. We have lives. I’m pretty sure Glassdoor is sophisticated enough that their platform wouldn’t allow fake accounts to leave reviews in such rapid succession. The accounts that have left these reviews are from real people, who’ve had their accounts for their entire careers, which has probably been quite a while since most reviews seem to be coming in from people in leadership positions.
