Help me out here, am i being unreasonable?
– dispatch company found me a job that they told me was remote and going to the office was very rare. (this is important for me and maybe 80% of the reason i am taking this job at all)
– i have not officially signed on to the dispatch company yet.
– dispatch company only mentions that the first day of work is in-office after they pester me to accept the naitei over 2 days. They keep re-iterating that i cant cancel acceptance of the naitei before the contract signing.
– i ask them if the job is actually remote at all and what their other dispatch employees have experienced.
– dispatch company says 1. It was covid, so the previous employees were remote from day 1, and 2, some did not live in tokyo and so were fully remote. They also said they would confirm with the office as to what the team is doing with wfh.
– i think this response is a bit vague and seems to imply that the company is moving away from wfh, but the dispatch is not telling me this directly in case i decide not to do this job. (i was told they have been looking for a candidate for several months with no luck.)
– i feel like they pulled a bait and switch on me. I have had to ask them several times for information that i feel should be given automatically, and had my concerns hand-waved away for not having experience working in japan. (if it matters, the person in charge of my case is not japanese either.)
– i might be a bit paranoid: the dispatch company has bad reviews on google (that i found out recently) and before i accepted the naitei they called multiple times a day to confirm which i found excessive. Also my spouse has been telling me dispatch companies are terrible and shouldn’t be trusted, so that might be clouding my judgement a little.
7 comments
If you’re having doubts about the dispatch company, you’re most likely justified in feeling that way. Most dispatch companies routinely deceive (prospective) employees with half-truths and outright lies.
You can always bail if you need to bail. When to do it is a question. Do you have anything else lined up right now?
You’re definitely being reasonable. They are stringing you along, but we don’t know exactly why.
I have a feeling remote work is going to be disappearing for the most part now that covid restrictions are being lifted. A lot of people are going to have to adjust to the reality of going back to the office to work.
Dispatch companies are frequently light on details as they are not the employing entity. You’re asking questions they need to relay. And the person you ask likely isn’t the one close enough to the client to ask.
That said, they are often poorly run operations.
How long is the contract for?
Oh. The paranoia about you canceling after naitei is their loss of reputation to their end customer who they will pump you out to.
Tldr; the world of work is fucked. And outsourcing is just a reflection of that. Wanna know the likely margin they’ll make on your services?
Not all dispatch companies are the same. Same for recruiting companies. There are some black sheep out there but it’s not like they are all evil.
The dispatch company makes money the longer you stay.
There’s no point for them to pull a bait and switch as that means you’d leave shortly after joining. That means they wouldn’t make much money and end up upsetting their clients
>They keep re-iterating that i cant cancel acceptance of the naitei before the contract signing.
Meaning you can’t cancel the naitei after accepting it and before signing your actual contract?
In that case, they’re already lying and you should be on your toes. While it’s of course not good practice to be withdrawing your naitei after accepting, if you feel like you’ve been told things that were untruthful about work conditions and the like, there is not much a company can and will do legally speaking if you do decide to withdraw your accepted naitei. Especially if you explain to them why you are pulling out and have written proof of you being provided with inconsistent information.
Even though labor laws are on your side here, be prepared to burn some bridges though.
>i think this response is a bit vague and seems to imply that the company is moving away from wfh, but the dispatch is not telling me this directly in case i decide not to do this job. (i was told they have been looking for a candidate for several months with no luck.)
Very possible since at least some companies are trying to get their employees back in the office at the moment. Keep pressing for answers and tell them politely to stuff it with their naitei if they can’t give you a clear answer. This stuff isn’t rocket science, it’s a simple yes or no question. Being vague = we don’t want to tell you the thing we already know and you probably don’t want to hear.
Is it just the first day that they need you to be on-site? There could be some in-person onboarding activities to get started and then the full remote starts later. You should see if you can get more details and get them in writing.