Hi there,
I wanted to tell you a little about my experience in a company that tries to do things well.
After working in horrible companies and doing absurd job interviews, which is typical in Spain, a lady contacted me through LinkedIn and sent me the link to a job offer from her company.
The first thing that caught my attention is that the lady’s profile photo was perfect. The lighting, the framing, the clothes, everything. This already gave me a good feeling about the company.
The job offer was well explained and written. Another plus point.
I asked about the salary, and she told me right away. When in general, in Spain they want to make you go through the selection process and at the end, it is that they tell you the salary.
We agreed for an initial contact. My first interview was with this lady from HR.
Another good thing is that they always fit into my schedule without a problem. Although it seems obvious, there are many people who contact you to do a job interview and even seeing on your cv that you work, they are not able to understand that you cannot use the time of your current job or lunch to do an interview for another job.
I did 5 interviews in total and a test. Throughout the process they always asked me if I was happy with the job position and if I wanted to work with them.
What I loved about the job was firstly the fact that it was remote and secondly, the salary and the way they paid. It is a job that can be done from anywhere in the world if you have a computer and internet.
So, in that aspect it was what I wanted: a job that would allow me to move around the world.
What I didn’t like very much is that you work from Tuesday to Saturday and that there are only 15 days of vacation a year. But then they told me that if you need it, you can ask for more unpaid vacations.
That’s how I got to work in the world of financial services. Although I had no idea about this, they trained me since I had a vast experience in customer service.
One thing that caught my attention is that, in one of the meetings with my boss, she asked me if I knew how to use Gmail or if she needed me to explain how to use it because she knew that there were people who had never used Gmail in their life. Although it may seem silly, it meant a lot to me, not all bosses have that capacity and humanity to understand that the employee does not necessarily have to know everything.
In fact, in my previous job, if I didn’t know how to use a tool, the answer was always “How come you don’t know how to use it?”.
I also liked that in all the interviews I had been told that the company was far from perfect, that there was a lot to do, and that the job could be quite stressful. I liked that sincerity.
The first few months I had weekly meetings with my boss to tell her how work was going and specially to see how I felt in the new position. An unimaginable thing in Spain.
Since we work remotely, the company makes two trips a year so the team can share and get to know each other better. On top of this, every Thursday we do a company-wide meeting where sometimes it may only be an hour and a half to chat with colleagues.
Additionally, no one is controlling your schedules or medical certificates. It is assumed that people do their job and tell the truth, it is part of the culture of the company. A culture that I had only known in my first job in Venezuela.
The bad thing is that this company tried to cover too much without perfecting even one thing. So, everything worked halfway, and they were losing money everywhere. Thus, from one day to the next, after the global pandemic was decreed, the company laid off more than half of the workforce.
People woke up one day to find everything blocked and unable to access the corresponding platforms to work, they had even been removed from the WhatsApp group. It is the protocol in most companies, even if it is quite inhumane.
The CEO held a meeting with all those fired to explain that due to his bad decisions, the company had been losing a lot of money for years and that now they were going to focus on a single business model. This at the same time implied a future shock for clients since they were going to take away most of the services they had.
The good thing the company did was give everyone three months’ salary from the day of dismissal, this in Spain doesn’t even happen to you in dreams. In addition, they put a person from human resources to dedicate himself for 3 months to help the recently laid off to find work.
Although it’s not perfect (I don’t think any company is), that desire to do things right and that respect for employees was like a miracle after coming across so many junk companies in Spain.