Buckle up, this one is a doozy.
Back in August of 2021, I started a fully remote Marketing Specialist role with a large company. Things were odd from the start, as the person who interviewed and hired me was not my boss. The person who was to be my boss happened to be coming back from a lengthy time on medical leave due to cancer. For the first 6ish months, things were going well. The job had me doing things that weren’t in the job description, but I felt like I needed to give it a bit longer before I decided if the role fit me. At about 6 months into the position, my boss dropped it on my head that there wasn’t enough work for my job to be fully remote, and that per the job description, she wanted the role to be 50% travel. And when I say travel, I mean across the country to one of our many accounts. Leave Tuesday night, get back Friday night type stuff. I was shocked. I explained to her that during my interview, I was told that the only travel required would be occasionally to the corporate office (2-hour drive from me), which was true. And that there was no mention of 50% travel or anything remotely like it. After a lot of discussions, my boss determined that we could try to “find” enough work for me to justify the role and not require me to have to travel.
The summer starts to go by but not without some events that unfolded that lead to my boss putting me on a PIP. Some things I will admit were slight carelessness/working too quickly on my part, but everything I did was routinely torn apart by my boss to the point where I felt almost paralyzed to submit my work in fear that she would find something wrong with it. In August, the PIP starts and it outlines several areas where I needed to improve or face termination. The next month goes by and at about the time I would have expected to sit down with her to review the PIP, I find out that she is back on medical leave due to her cancer coming back.
For the next two months, I essentially continue to go about my business. I was under the impression that she would eventually be back and wanted to make sure things were running smoothly for when she returned so that no negativity could be directed at me. In November I received a call that she had passed away due to complications from her cancer.
Immediately after this, my boss’s boss, we’ll call him John, steps in and ask me to meet him for a bite to eat so we can go over things and he can give me an idea of what expectations are moving forward. During this meeting, he reintroduces the PIP and presents it as “restarting” it because the previous one was never finished. For the next 30 days (as stated in the PIP) I complete every task given to me with no issue. Before it’s completion, John tells me that he will set up our next meeting to determine if the PIP criteria have been met (and this meeting is also tied into my yearly appraisal review that determines my raise). This meeting never happened. John never reached out to me, and I (stupidly) never followed up on this. I know that I should have reached out, but I felt as though the ball was in his court. To be honest I figured the PIP was quietly discarded or I would be updated during my mid-year review. Weeks and months went by with no discussion about the topic and things just seemed business as usual. I was assigned tasks and did them well.
This morning, he let me know that I was terminated. He went over the PIP document with me, and as he is talking, things are making less and less sense. I am falsely blamed for losing a laptop which never happened, and he claims that our “January meeting went well”. That meeting never happened. He asks me to sign the notice of termination, and I explain that I cannot do that until the errors explaining why I was fired are corrected.
I shook his hand, and he tells me that he thinks I was such a great guy, and this doesn’t mean I can’t work with the company or another sector of the business again, and he genuinely would like to help me find a role in the future. I walked out and now I feel like complete shit. Not sure where to go from here.
I feel as though I lack the marketing hard skills that some have, and I’m worried that it will be difficult to find a new role. Maybe I’m just stressing out but this feels terrible.