TLDR: Company has been acting shady with ghosting employees and interviewees, no pay raises but major increases in responsibilities, CEO is a boomer obsessed with AI and wants to use AI to eliminate my entire team within 2 years or less.
Sorry in advance if this is too long, I just really need to hear other perspectives on this:
I work for a health tech company producing medical content for frontline healthcare workers. This includes onboarding materials, at-the-minute reminders, annual competencies, equipment orientations, etc. I have mostly enjoyed the work that I do and it feels good to know that maybe somewhere down the line, something I worked on truly helped someone, whether it was a nurse or a patient.
However, the company has been making questionable moves since I started. I was initially offered a full-time job with a decent salary, but turned it down for a better offer with a different company, but asked to still work part-time with the health tech company because I knew I would have bandwidth. They said yes, but the hourly rate didn't quite match the salary. Which was fine, it was still fair for part-time work.
Fast forward a year; I have to leave the full-time job I accepted because of a move, and asked to be brought on full-time with the health tech company. They were more than happy as I was really solid for them as a part-timer, sometimes matching or exceeding the work of full-timers because I had the extra time. The offer that came through…. was several thousand less than what they offered me a year ago. Inflation jumped 10% within that year and they knew I was moving to a higher COL area. I tried to negotiate but hit a total stone wall and with no other options, had to accept their lower offer. This really rubbed me the wrong way, but I tucked my head down like a good employee and got to work.
We also tend to have a lot of turnover due to using intern labor from desperate pre-med students wanting any experience they can get to bolster their resume. However, they do tend to try and hire full-timers because when work picks up, it really picks up and we need all the hours from people we can get. I have suggested 2 friends (also very qualified friends for the job). For both of them, they interviewed 3 times over the span of 2 weeks, and then completely ghosted them. Never told them they went with someone else, never replied to follow up emails my friends would send after feeling like they were a prime candidate after multiple interviews. Feels pretty scummy.
Jump forward another 4-5 months, I now have a coordinator role, onboard and train employees, serve as video lead, and as a content lead for 3 clients. The pay never changed, title change was informal and not documented. I am basically told “if you crush this next project, a raise and promotion is inevitable”. Honestly, we fucking crushed the next project, blew away the client and brought it in a week early with no revisions. I felt like Superman and just made my company over $500k by bringing it home. It's documented that I carried this project from start to finish with the help of 1 other person. This is not to be braggy, but to show I took charge and got the shit done. Running projects is a thrill for me!
Since then, some talks engaged about a promotion and raise and essentially creating this awesome new position for me. I even got a Google Project Management Certificate (not much, I know, but it's something) and have been studying for CAPM. Then, the talks fell flat, my messages went unanswered for weeks and I got pissed that I was ghosted.
In our next team meeting, our CEO joins for some reason to sit in and at the end of it says something to the effect of “We envision AI doing all of this in the next 2 years and having one or two people manage it”, essentially telling my 14 person team “None of you will have jobs in 2 years if things go my way”. He then says the same exact thing in an all-hands meeting the following week, saying he wants to eliminate our content production team and only have a manager. No one on the team is happy to hear that, but this culture is so introverted due to the fully remote culture that no one talks about it.
A week after that meeting an external candidate was hired for the position me and my managers were discussing creating for me. To a tee, her job description is what we wrote for me before I was ghosted about a promotion.
In 3 months I went from being a star for the company to being thrown on the back burner and receiving weird messages from my manager saying that I needed to be spending more time on producing client work…. after they tasked me with being an onboarding lead for interns that never stop cycling in and out and produce a bunch of internal content and videos.
I feel like they are trying to get me to quit without firing me so they do not have to pay me a severance. They went from hiring people with my background (comms, writing, and video) to hiring only people with more medical backgrounds, or college students hoping to get good experience before applying to med school.
At this point, I have one foot out the door and I am applying to anywhere I can with equal or better pay. But part of me wants to stay because I feel like I have done so much work for them, there's no way they would just throw me in the bin, but that's for sure the vibe I have been getting lately.
Am I best off applying and recruiting hard anywhere else and leaving this company as nothing more than a solid resume piece?