Capgemini

The company paid regularly and on time until the moment they terminated the contract without prior notice. Once I lost access to corporate systems, the company withheld the final payment they owed me for nearly 15 days. This coerced me into writing humiliating ‘debt collection’ emails to the administrative personnel, simply asking for the money I was owed as unpaid salary, but which was too small an amount to demand in court. This is still the least negative aspect, as I was finally paid in full for my service. I considered the salary competitive enough to sign the contract in the first place.

An overly negative employee experience.

I was offered a contract for a non-management position after a strangely superficial, lax selection process involving a screening with a junior HR employee and a separate, brief videoconference with three employees. I accepted the offer after one of the three non-HR people called me and convinced me to take the position as their reportee.

On the second day at the company, after being introduced to the person I was expected to report to, whom I liked, I was assigned a new supervisor who wasn’t competent in the job and had a dubious professional track record, both within the company and in their known previous activity as a contractor and alleged entrepreneur.

Since that moment, I became almost invisible as an employee: the manager was systematically absent from meetings and most basic management duties concerning my job; I didn’t have a formal role defined in the corporate directory, just a default string supplied by HR based on the offer letter; nobody ever initiated my record in the employee performance management system; my employee record remained completely blank for three months, and I never received any information about the performance review process or goals; nobody ever shared with me or invited me to a meeting where meaningful KPIs about the business, such as department- or country-level revenue figures, project signings, or employee utilization metrics, were disclosed.

Nevertheless, I managed to work on a few assignments, as I always tried to express a willingness to work and contribute to the business whenever I was given the opportunity to meet with peer employees. However, I was denied the option to record in the timesheet system any of the hours I worked on different projects. One of the assignments was clearly a ‘phantom project’ that never had any meaningful direction or objectives, and it was easy to infer that the position I was filling was being used as a ‘scapegoat’ to terminate it. In the rare assignments that involved customer interaction, I never got to see a real contract or had any means to record my activity. After three months in the job, my contract was terminated unilaterally without prior notice, exactly one day after the first time I spoke up, during my time off, in an email addressed to a senior management employee, about one of the many irregularities I had observed.

Pay closer attention to potentially corrupt and irregular activities by mid-management employees. Scrutinize the employee hiring, onboarding, and termination procedures, which, in my experience, lack the seriousness and due diligence expected of such a prominent global company and, by the way, one of the largest IT government contractors in the EU.