We’re often warned that companies don’t want to hire people who bad-mouth prior employers - but what about the bosses who bad-mouth former employees?

We as Young Professionals can find ourselves on the wrong end of a raw deal sometimes. We’re young, and as such we’re generally lacking in experience and bulging contact books. This makes us relatively expendable to many organisations, and the cold reality is that there are many managers out there who will not let you forget that.

These folk also tend to dismiss the fact that we are bright, hardworking and less likely than the generation before us to stay in one job our whole lives and accept poor working conditions or career prospects.

Whether you believe young workers “deserve” more than they get or “overvalue” themselves, there are certain types of behaviour that the odd boss decides to employ that can plunge our fledgling careers and self belief into turmoil, and I of course wouldn’t be writing about such a thing had this not happened to me.

This is the first of two posts I decided to put together to show other Young Professionals whose reputations are taking a battering at the hands of a vengeful or misguided ex-boss how to deal with those feelings of hurt, betrayal and injustice.

Case study one

I once came to blows with an employer who had made promises of a future promotion plus a pay rise to go with it. Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Of course, when the day of the promotion came, the mention of the pay rise was received with total surprise and rejection.

Within minutes I had become unprofessional, manipulative and an all-round awful human being. I was holding a gun to my employer’s head and in no uncertain terms would I receive a pay rise. Threats were made to take my new job title away from me. Within the hour I had handed my notice in.

Well, that escalated quickly! Or did it? My boss had been telling me for a long time leading up to this that I was better at the job than my line manager. My line manager was regularly ridiculed in front of the rest of the company by our boss, until they eventually parted ways (one will tell you it was a firing, the other will tell you it was a mutual thing), and hired a new manager who, as it turned out, barely knew how to use a computer.

It then became my job to teach the new manager how to do things they had claimed they could do on their CV, all the while doing both of our jobs, with my boss whispering in my ear that it should have always been the plan to promote me instead, and that once the new manager was gone I would be built up to take on the role and learn on the job. It was during an appraisal in the middle of all of this that the future promotion plus pay rise were mentioned.

The new manager was soon let go, and my boss finally took steps towards promoting me. Physical, tangible steps. However, on that first, fateful day, with a new junior en-route ready for me to train, the second the subject of money came up my boss was instantly filled with rage, realising that I had waited until the new manager had gone before broaching it. Well, call me crazy for not trusting my boss to follow through on their aforementioned promise.

Out of nowhere, I was attacked for asking for an “eight grand pay rise“. At no point did I specify a price. I simply argued that the two managers before me had earned a lot more than me when I was supposedly doing a better job than both of them - in spite of their many years of experience. Their retort was astounding - I had been doing the job for four months now anyway, so why would they need to pay me any more? My boss then proceeded to zone in on my young age, plucked a ludicrous figure out of the air and created a prima donna persona for me.

In the weeks that followed I heard various reports from industry contacts. The most hurtful was that I was such a “very junior member of staff” that my loss was of little consequence. Now, I’m not saying I’m the most charismatic person destined to be a figure head for any company and that my departure will be mourned by the masses, but I can say that I was damn good at keeping my department running smoothly and keeping my cool under what was an immense amount of pressure.

The truth can come out in the ugliest of ways. I found the entire experience a very interesting and personal lesson in how to take flattery and promises with a pinch of salt. I was essentially a great bargain for the salary I was on but with little notoriety in my field, and so could not command the same respect as my older counterparts, which is something I’ll remember when I’m old and saggy dealing with the bright young things of the next generation.

Should I have waited a few months into the role to bring up the subject of pay, after I had proved my “worth”? Some of you may think so, it’s certainly one of the arguments my former boss tried. And perhaps in any other situation I might have, had I not already been promised a pay rise; had I not been told I was already doing a better job than others in the same position; and had I been a believer in negotiating your new contract three months into the job. Who does that?

Instead of gently fobbing me off with the promise of an appraisal three/six months into my new role, I was met with hostility, no offer of a plan whatsoever to increase my salary in the future aside from my standard annual appraisal, and personal attacks on my age and experience. I left a month later with a hastily written leaving card and a bad taste in my mouth.

The whole ordeal shook me to my core. I felt bullied out of a job that I had worked hard to prove I could do, I didn’t have any proof of my level of responsibility or the years of experience on my CV to just walk into another job at the same level, I felt used up, and I just wanted the company to burn.

I decided to take a break for a couple of months, doing a bit of this and that and using my savings to cover my half of the bills. After feeling stuck waiting around for an opportunity that never materialised and then going through that nastiness, it was liberating to take some time to myself and figure some things out.

Of course, in an ideal world we’d all have new jobs lined up, but exceptional circumstances can and do crop up, and sometimes it can overwhelm you to go from one bad experience to an all-new environment, so I really recommend saving up enough money to tide you over should you ever find yourself in a situation that you can’t resolve amicably.

I also had to keep in mind that every nasty thing said about me was being kept over email, phone and face to face, and that I would never have any proof of what this person had put me through. This inconsequential post on my tiny corner of the internet which represents countless conversations spent raging about this person is the only proof I’ll ever have.

And I’m at the point now where I’m okay with that. My eye still twitches when their name comes up in conversation, sure, but in the end I’ve ended up in a role that I want to stick at in a company I want to stick with, and I’m feeling just fine about where I am in my career, because I’m happy and healthy.

If you ever find yourself in a similar situation, rather than naming people who have hurt you in a public manner, try doing what I did: meet up with some like-minded industry contacts and competitors instead for a drink and a good old bitch.

Remember: chances are that people who do crappy things to you have done crappy things to a lot of other people. And some of those people might just be sitting on proof of those other crappy things.

Go on, have a good rant in the comments below. I won’t tell your boss.