Thanks to TikTok, many job hunters gotten a lot better at spotting toxic jobs—from former employees of certain industries outright telling folks to avoid working there, to HR experts advising people on the key questions they should ask in order to identify an unhealthy workplace before it’s too late.
Miles From HR (@milesfromHR), a TikToker with 129,000 followers, is the latest human resources worker to use his experience to arm his audience with the knowledge they need before applying to jobs. And in one of his latest videos, he’s taking aim at these toxic workplaces, and sharing how they inadvertently show their own red flags during the interview process.
“I’m gonna tell you a secret right now,” he began. “Any job that starts pressing a little too hard about why you left each and every job, you know, and want to ask a lot of more negative behavioral questions like, ‘How do you deal with a difficult supervisor? How do you deal with difficult team members?’ Any company that I’ve worked for that asked me a lot of those questions, when I got the job, I realized they were basically just preparing me to see if I can handle the negative workplace culture that they had.”
@milesfromhr #genz #careerstrategy #interviewtips ♬ original sound – MilesFromHR👨🏿💻
According to Miles, one of the best ways to handle this stream of red-flag questioning is to pull the interviewer up on it directly. He explained, “I’ve straight up asked recruiters sometimes, like, at the end of the interview, or like after I’ve already gotten the job, and I’m getting like feedback, I’m like, you know, ‘I thought some of your questions were really interesting. Can you share a bit about how you selected those?’”
The reason this is significant, Miles added, is because “there are a million things you could ask, [but if] most your questions are about how do you deal with a negative workplace environment, that is because their workplace environment is negative and they want to know if you can handle it.”
The solution? “Get back into the market and start applying for some other jobs, because it ain’t worth it,” Miles concludes. “There’s too many jobs.”
In an era of ‘quiet quitting’ and strikes across various industries, workers are more attuned than ever to the importance of standing up for themselves. And this much was clear in the comments of Miles’ TikTok, as users shared their own experiences and advice about how to avoid toxic jobs.
“When they say ‘I want us to be like family here,’ [that] basically [means] making you do everything in an uncomfortable environment,” one commenter noted.
Another identified interview questions about “going above and beyond” as being a red flag because “they want to know if you can do the job of three people on minimum pay.”
And a third simply observed, “Instead of managers actually taking accountability for the toxic work environment they try to hire spineless people to maintain their superiority.”
The Daily Dot reached out to Miles via TikTok comment.
