I'm a hard working 34 year old woman. I was employed at a non profit for about 3 years. It wasn't the best job or the best paying job, but I liked all my coworkers and I liked that I was helping the community. One day the marketing person is moving onto another job, this guy was old school, did things like put print ads in newspapers and actually recorded and put an ad on TV. I was excited because I thought I was a no brainer to take his place after he left. I have a degree in New Media and Graphic Design and have extensive knowledge in video editing software, animation and game design. As well I knew the in and out of the company. I had also gone above and beyond in my job, helping the marketing department with new media projects, getting videos on youtube, sound editing / cleanup, making an interactive training program in Unity, and more.
I put in for the job and an interview gets set up. Everyone on my team is excited to have me as the new marketing person! Everyone thinks that this whole interview is mostly a formality. I do my interview and even do a presentation on how we can modernize our business for little to no costs, how we can do work with VR to help our clients and excite donors to get more funding. The interview does a full 2 hours over with the hiring community asking a ton of questions. It seems the hiring committee is excited about everything I was saying! Well everyone but one lady let's call her Karen and 40 something, rich board member, who is just sitting there silently. I don't think that there is a problem, maybe Karen is just taking it all in.
Two weeks goes by and I'm informed by the head of HR (A friend of mine) that I didn't get the job. I was crushed, I had been working so hard and was excited to make the non profit the best it could be. So I ask HR who was hired? She says, “Well, no one actually.” Wait what? So it seems they offered the job to a Middle aged white guy, who after getting the offer turned it down because he got a better offer someplace else. So I ask well why am I not getting the job? Turns out Karen said that if they just keep me in my current position I'll still do all the work I was doing and they won’t need to pay me as much as if I got the marketing job. So I probably would never get promoted as long as Karen has any say in the matter.
So I say, F this and tell HR that I'm going to be looking for other work because I got screwed over hard and this is not cool. Then I tell my boss that I'm doing my job to the letter, I'm no longer going above or beyond, not helping any other departments with projects, etc. and I let them know that it's because if there is no room for growth and I'm stuck in this job this is all they are getting out of me. I immediately start sending out resumes and taking vacation and sick days to go to interviews. After about 6 weeks of this I land a job at an amazing mobile game company as a game designer. The work is way more fun, takes half the energy and I get a x2.5 pay bump!
I talked to my HR friend a few days ago and Karen is back maturity leave for a few months now and shocker they can't find anyone to replace me in my old position, nor can they find anyone qualified for the marketing job. Everyone that worked with me is so pissed about the situation and still says things like “Shame ___ isn't here to do that.” or “You know who could have had this solved this in five seconds? ____.” or “Does anyone know how to do this now that ____ is gone?”
Morale of the story give your workers what they deserve / reward hard work or you are going to loose your best people.