A few hours ago, I handed in my laptop and ID card after the CEO fired me during a meeting with the team. I'm still upset and somewhat relieved at the same time, but the anxiety about rent and bills is already starting to take over.
I had been working at the company for about 13 months, handling marketing for a low salary. Every week, I had to give a presentation on our numbers, and the targets were never based on the available budget or resources. Once, he expected organic traffic to increase by 45% in four weeks, and he wanted the website to appear on the first page within six weeks.
Whenever I explained to him that SEO takes time, he would start yelling. He would ask why I was even on the team, tell me to resign, and say that he didn't want to work with useless people. After a while, I stopped going to him unless I had no other choice, because even the simplest questions could turn into an insult in front of everyone.
Today's meeting went the same way. I presented the tasks I had completed and the results, and then he asked me why organic search wasn't generating 65% of our leads within a month. I told him the goal was unrealistic, especially with the resources we had.
He told me to admit that I didn't know how to do my job. I have eight years of experience, so I calmly told him that I understood my responsibilities well and that what I was saying was a professional assessment, not an excuse. He raised his voice in front of everyone and fired me on the spot.
I gathered my things and left without arguing. Part of me feels relieved that I won't have to keep working in that environment, but I have almost no savings because the salary was extremely low. If you were in my position, would you have stayed quiet in that meeting, or was I right to finally speak up?

After sending around 40 applications a week and getting virtually no responses, I stopped trying to guess what the problem was. I didn't want to pay for another resume scanner, so I instructed GPT to act like an old ATS that doesn't forgive any mistakes. I asked it to strip away any visual design, compare the plain text with the job description, and evaluate everything with a strict mindset: either match or reject.
The result revealed a lot. My two-column template was scrambling parts of my work history, and I was also using a lot of terms that differed from the ones used in the job postings. I switched to a simple, single-column layout and added the appropriate wording it had identified. About a week later, I started getting screening calls.
The prompt was roughly: "Act like an old ATS. Read this CV as plain text, compare it with the job description, make a list of the missing keywords, and explain frankly, without sugarcoating it, why this application might be automatically rejected." A polished layout won't make much difference if the software turns your experience into incomprehensible text before any recruiter sees it.

I learned to say damn it.