You know the saying - "Never meet your heroes"? Yeah, after joining Tiktok, even using the app itself left me a bad taste in my mouth.
Culture
The culture at the GPRD TA team is super bad. You would think that a giant organization like TikTok is globalised but no. Meetings, documents and conversations are conducted in Mandarin Chinese even if there are people/minorities who do not understand the language. A
s someone who first joined the team, I could feel the segregation between the permanent employees and the contract staff. As a contract staff, you are treated like a peasant. On my first day, they gave me a nasty look when I was introduced to them, as if I was an annoyance. Very good first day experience!
Diversity & Inclusion This is a joke.
As someone who did recruitment in this team, I can tell you that fluency in Chinese is an implicit requirement. Good luck to people with resumes that do not state that outright, because there's a lot of recruitment biases going around.
Recruitment Strategy
The recruitment strategy for this team is very straightforward. Spam everyone! You know those WhatsApp/Phone scammers? Guess what, this TA team is more persistent than them. Not replying to them out of lack of interest? Expect another message in 1/2 days.
Without a doubt, this is a full-on agency environment. Brought in by the lead and maintained by the TA Partners, it's all about the numbers. People are sending random resumes to irrelevant roles just to boost their numbers. Oh and please if you join this team, please please keep track of your candidates that you entered into the system. People are always watching and will snatch from you once the locking period is up.
All of this is because of the team culture and focus on numbers. Do well and they will clap for you, "Top Performer of the Month" and then it's back to spamming candidates.
Everyone is burnt out and tired, there are a finite number of candidates that fit the criteria. I really doubt software engineers are born into this world every minute with full grasp of their tech stack that can sustain this insane recruitment strategy of spamming people and passing them around positions like their tissue paper.
