This post, my former coworkers hired me to work for them … but it was a bait and switch, they fired me, and I’m ashamed , was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
A reader writes:
I was recently fired from my job. I never thought I would find myself in this position, and while mentally I am struggling to get past the emotional aspect of it, I know I have to push through and focus on finding another job.
My situation was a bit uncommon. A few months ago, two former coworkers — Amy and Brooke — reached out to me. I had a great relationship with them and saw them as mentors. The job we worked together at was in, let’s say, custom teapot painting (I’m disguising the real field for anonymity’s sake). I found that it wasn’t my strong suit and it was a very toxic company, so I went to a company where I did teapot painting in-house. I was great at this new job and consistently got great performance reviews in two years there.
Amy and Brooke started their own custom teapot company, and they wanted me as their first hire. I turned down the job three separate times, knowing this type of work catered to a lot of my weaknesses. Throughout every conversation, they were so complimentary to me, saying they knew how smart and capable I was and they hated that my old toxic company made me doubt myself. Finally, they told me that my role would not include managing the custom orders, but would just be painting the teapots.
On one hand, I was great at my current job, but felt like I wasn’t being challenged. I really looked up to these two women, trusted them a lot, and thought working with them would give me the opportunity to grow and develop more in my field. So, I decided to take it.
Before I officially accepted their offer, I tried negotiating the proposed salary for just a few thousand dollars more. Here’s the first red flag: They said for that level of salary, they would want me to take on some of the responsibilities of being the point of contact for some of these custom orders, just for one to two projects. I thought it was a strange practice for that small of an increase, but again, they were so complimentary and said they knew I could do it, and I leaned on the trust I had in them, so I ultimately accepted. Since I hadn’t done that type of role for over two years, my employment contract stated that I would take on that role six months after starting, and the raise would come when I took those responsibilities on.
Fast forward. About two weeks into the job, Amy said I was doing such a great job that I would be moved up to the PM role (with the salary boost) now instead of waiting six months. A few weeks later, they asked if I wanted to take on more (basically back to what my role was at the old toxic company) for an even bigger pay boost. I remember thinking that it felt like a bait and switch, but they made me feel like I really could do this. I thought maybe my imposter syndrome was worse than I thought and they saw something in me I couldn’t see myself. They said they would always be there to support me if I had issues, so I felt comfortable enough and accepted.
About a month into the role, things had changed even more, we nearly doubled in size, and everyone else in my role had significantly more experience than me. As we grew, I got the feeling they wanted to take a more hands-off approach. I was the only PM who didn’t have a painting partner, so I felt like I didn’t have anyone to even bounce ideas off of without being a major inconvenience. One of my projects was for something I had never done before, and I was really in over my head. I was working until 8 pm or later and sobbing over dinner every night at the thought everything on my plate.
I ended up making a few incorrect assumptions on that project. The customer never found out, but it did slightly mess up the budget for the project. Here’s the thing — while I took responsibility and apologized, I feel like with the information I had, they weren’t the craziest assumptions to come to. Maybe I should have defended my decision-making style more so they could have seen where I was coming from, but I didn’t want to seem like I was making excuses so I just apologized and fixed what I could.
During all of this, I also was having difficulties on a project where it was the company’s third time trying to design for a client who couldn’t stop changing their minds. Amy tried, Brooke tried, and now me. It was bad timing, but that project began to fly off the rails right as this issue came up.
Initially, they seemed annoyed, but late that week they told me, “We all mess up sometimes, we still mess up to this day all the time!” and, “We knew exactly what we were getting when we hired you and this is the company you’ll retire from.”
The following week, they fired me. It was a 10-minute conversation, and when I asked why I couldn’t be put on a PIP or have a warning, Amy said, “This is really uncomfortable for me so let’s keep this short.” They offered me an exit interview, but not with them, with a new admin they had just hired. Right after the conversation, they locked my work computer and that was that.
Since then, I’ve tried so hard to take my ego out of this situation and look at it different ways. Mentally I was really struggling. I live alone and had been in complete solitude for months due to Covid, and it had started to weigh on me. An old eating disorder resurfaced due to the anxiety I was under at this job. I felt like I didn’t have the option to go into treatment because I couldn’t miss work. Ultimately, I know this role just wasn’t a fit for me. But I really tried as hard as I could. I wanted to be the great employee I thought they saw me as. Given the history I had with them, I feel like there’s an added layer to this firing that isn’t there with most, and it’s been hard to get over.
I feel like a lot of this was imposter syndrome coming true. My confidence in myself professionally has plummeted. I feel scared to apply for jobs if I don’t surpass every single qualification. I’m now in weekly therapy for my eating disorder as well as this situation, and it has helped.
My question for you is how to handle this during my job search. I was only there five months. Should I leave this off my resume completely? Or will that raise more red flags? They did agree (in writing) to give a neutral reference. What does that mean for the employer side? I know I have to figure out how to explain this in interviews in a matter-of-fact way, and I was hoping you could provide a script on how to do that.
Right now I just feel like a total loser. I’ve still been keeping it a secret from a lot of my friends and family because I’m so ashamed.
You’re not a loser. You were pressured into taking a job that wasn’t right for you, and you were set up to fail from early on. Not intentionally, I assume — but Brooke and Amy mishandled this on so many fronts that it’s hard not to see their incompetence as an almost willful disregard for you.
Let’s review how they operated here:
* You turned down the job with them three separate times because you knew it played to your weaknesses, and yet they kept pushing — overriding your judgment with their own judgment, for reasons that still aren’t clear. In this process, it seems like they “love-bombed” you — flooding you with compliments and praise that wore down your defenses. That could be innocent — maybe they just genuinely liked you and your work and wanted to work together again — but when people shower you with compliments while trying to override your “no,” it’s hard not to see that as manipulative.
* They gave you a contract stating that your first six months on the job wouldn’t include the work you were wary of … and then reneged on that only two weeks in, knowing that you didn’t want to take on that work yet and knowing they had agreed not to ask it of you.
* A few days after telling you “we all mess up sometimes” and “we knew exactly what we were getting when we hired you” and “this is the company you’ll retire from,” they fired you. (By the way, telling an employee “this is the company you’ll retire from” is an odd thing to say, especially a few months into their employment. Amy and Brooke have a pattern where they like to make really grandiose statements that don’t line up with their with their later actions. And “later” sometimes means three days later.)
In other words, they wooed you hard to get you to leave a job you were happy with, then made a series of bad decisions that ensured it wouldn’t work out, and now appear to be cavalier that their actions left you with no job at all.
Amy and Brooke did you wrong at pretty much every turn. They might not have meant to — they might be head-in-the-clouds idealists who think everything will be great up until the moment they realize it’s not — but they did.
(And it would be different if they hadn’t wooed you so hard. There would still be all the other ways they messed up — but what they did is especially horrible because you didn’t even want to leave your job! They talked you into it!)
I’m curious about what else you saw of Amy and Brooke’s management because I’m thinking there’s no way it was good. Their words don’t match their actions, they pressure people into things they don’t want to do, they overpromise things they can’t/won’t deliver, and they don’t have forthright conversations about problems. And they say things like “This is really uncomfortable for me so let’s keep this short” while firing a person whose livelihood they treated like a toy.
So that’s them. You? Your mistake was letting yourself be talked into taking a job you knew wasn’t aligned with your strengths, but a lot of people in your shoes would have done the same thing, after all the praise and assurances of unwavering support. It’s highly understandable.
I hate that Amy and Brooke messed up so profoundly and repeatedly, but somehow you are the one questioning yourself and feeling to blame.
As for your questions …
You could leave the job off your resume altogether (five months is a pretty short time), but interviewers will ask why you left the previous job and then it’s going to come up anyway. You’re better off listing it and then explaining in interviews, “I was hired to do X, which they’d seen me excel at when we worked together at OldCompany, but they ended up needing me to do Y, which is not a strength. My focus has always been X, and that’s what I’m looking for now.” That’s the truth, and it has the advantage of ensuring that any new employer is clear that they shouldn’t hire you if what they really want is someone doing Y.
As for the neutral reference Amy and Brooke agreed to give, ideally you’d find out more about what that means. Does it mean they’re just going to confirm that you worked there? Something else? Ideally they should say that they hired you to do X, which you’re great at, but the job changed to Y and so it didn’t work out. That’s true, it’ll confirm what you’re saying to interviewers, and it won’t be alarming. Can you contact them and negotiate that? (And while I don’t normally recommend reference letters — most reference checkers want to speak to references and ask their own questions — in this case it could be helpful to have that specific explanation in writing from them, as it’ll confirm what you’re saying … and writing it might reinforce that narrative in their heads in case they do get calls.)
But please stop being ashamed of what happened. You trusted two former coworkers, and they turned out to be dishonest and bad at running their business in ways that harmed you. The shame here is theirs.
![Mile High Club membership [✓] [ ] Discovery of parts of Amelia Earhart's skeleton [ ] [ ] Mid-flight incident that results in safe landing on the Hudson River [✓] [ ]](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/aviation_firsts.png "Mile High Club membership [✓] [ ] Discovery of parts of Amelia Earhart's skeleton [ ] [ ] Mid-flight incident that results in safe landing on the Hudson River [✓] [ ]")
