About that job posting a kind person posted..
There’s a great poster who kindly shared a job posting from their company that’s hiring an EA a few days ago. I’ve already messaged with them to share my experience and had their blessing in posting as I wanna be clear they did nothing wrong, and at face value, it’s not a bad job.
I just want to share with all the EAs here that if you apply for that job, understand that company specifically — has a very new EA support function. Over the last 6 months there has been so many changes to a team that’s quite new.
Initially it was centralized. Meaning, you didn’t report into your executive. You reported into an EA Team Lead. I supported an executive who was the manager to the executive my team lead supported, which was already quite a strange dichotomy. There were a lot of contentions and a lot of mismanaging of which happened. I won’t blame the EA team lead because they had no guidance whatsoever. Her “manager” was VP of Operations who truly functioned as CPO/Head of HR, so they provided no support to my manager and especially not us reporting into them. There was tension between my manager and I when they started, but that’s because
I found that because they hired them to build out a team, they came in with wanting to change how I’d been working with my executives (one of which was the ceo) for the duration of close to 10 months prior.
There was a change in the CEO in early December. I can’t expand onto some of my more particular thoughts as I don’t want to compromise my own identity. But basically, I supported the CEO who left in December. The company hired two new EAs in September, one of which didn’t know they were going to be supporting someone who would inevitably be named as the new CEO in no more than 10 weeks. There was no real training, it was truly make shift. Again, team lead did try their best but there was nothing for them to pull from as they had no support from their manager.
That said, I was let go of in February. The excuse was that my workload “decreased” since the former head of the company left (albeit I still had other execs). They knew he was leaving for months, and in turn weaponized that against me about two months later. They also at least decentralized the model so the remaining EAs could report into their execs directly.
The person supporting the new CEO got abruptly removed from their calendar in such a brash way (very disrespectful) and was being used as a scapegoat. They had already decided that they didn’t want her supporting this new head of company privately and never gave her any warnings about concerns or “performance”. The person she supported also didn’t pair too well with EAs in the past and didn’t really find value in the role, even called her handling of their calendar troubling. It was just odd. They made a weird pacifist switch to her role and gaslit her into believing it’s because she’s good at the 2 things they have her doing. Her title is still EA but does no job functions of one, only does operations and supports the former lead—so supports the execs all indirectly, while not being the face. They said really disparaging things about her. She knows a lot about many things. They informed us all, even me when telling me I’d be departing, that it was a business decision… all while also informing us they’d be hiring an EA for the marketing department. And honing in on the fact they wanted someone who has that exact experience. So; that’s the story of how that role opened up. The other real EA supports product persons.
One of the biggest issues with that company is they blame senior workers who have real life complex experience for their organizational chaos. They don’t properly train even the most capable people, and process is often a person. If people who have supported CEO’s of bigger orgs before find an issue here, then it’s not them. They also let go of people without setting them up for success, so if you apply for that EA role, just please understand it may be a bit unstable at first. And if at any point you get a glance of your role being “redesigned”, start looking elsewhere and truly just keep your options open. They will always blame things on business when it’s just them finally getting the cajones to cut people they don’t find value for.
I believe in responsibility but that company is truly a “it’s not you; it’s them” lol. The marketing EA role may be a lot better though.
Just sharing before some of you give up your roles at places more stable and more with possibility just to work at a dating app, because it sounds decent by listing.
Again no shade to that OP. I already connected with them and we actually have worked together in various capacities in cross functional situations. Small world.