Originally Posted by Unregistered

I know perfectly what you are trying to say, and it is a rather common story I have heard many times.

Base on my observations, most bosses do not like to criticize their subordinates directly. They may be secretly unhappy with your performance or received complaints about you, but choose to stick with the lousy but bearable known than risk firing & getting an unknown replacement. This can go on for years until pressure from the top comes to manage out poor performers. As a result many people have false impression they were doing well and expressed shock & anger when the chop comes.

As for your “promotion”, it is quite hard for me to judge as many companies practice “title promotion”, i.e. employees are promoted in their titles regardless of their performance but behind the scenes HR retains their record as unpromoted. This is done by HR to market the message to employees that the company values “talent” and provides a lot of “opportunities”.

I’m not saying that you definitely belong to the 2/3 something-wrong-but-not-willing-to-admit category. You could be genuinely saboed by company, but just providing another angle of possibility you may want to consider.




I would suggest you go on a 2 approaches. Firstly, invest more time to find out if the concerns cited in your PIP are valid. Do not dismiss them as a conspiracy to sack you just based on the fact that your boss has never scolded you or you picked up some promotions along the way. If there are genuine concerns, you might still address them.

Secondly, start looking out by posting your CV on the common job portals & recruit agencies. I am assuming you are at a junior level, so most of the agencies you find on newspapers like Robert Walter, Michael Page, Kelly etc should be fine. Just state that you have been around many years in current co. and would like to broaden your horizon by seeing if there are good opp in the market. Do not cite things like PIP or your allegation of management tactics to manage you out, agents will not empathize with you and might even have reservations on presenting you to the client because of perceived negativity.