5 Ways to Tell How Well a Potential Employer Would Treat You as an Employee

[Ruby the Liberal]

35. Another - If possible, meet with who will be co-workers or those working for you.

After being interviewed by 7 (!) members of the management and c-level team, I was offered a position to implement a new company-wide application. One of the first questions out of my mouth was to ask how the decision to purchase this application was made. I was assured that it was a collaborative effort, that end-user input was taken into account and that it was not a top-down decision.

Upon receiving the offer letter, I asked for the opportunity to meet with some end users to clarify some things before accepting.

Turns out that this was not only a top-down decision, but the software had been given to the company as an incentive to purchase something else. In doing a quick needs analysis, I realized that it would only accommodate 80% of what they currently had and would require either extensive customization or massive amounts of paper trails to do what was already automated inhouse currently.

As with any implementation, sales is a key component to user acceptance, but in this case, management wanted to wash their hands of that piece and put it on someone else so that no one had to take responsibility for the unhappy employees, eventual turnover, or a failed implementation.

I took these concerns to the CFO (hiring manager), who was thrilled that I was "astute" enough to pick up on that dynamic and "thorough" enough to ask for those extra meetings to flesh it all out.

Suffice to say, I declined. Within 6 months, I received 'profile change' updated from LinkedIn that indicated that both the HR Director and CFO had resigned and moved to another company. Lesson well learned.