TA at Global Product - Sourcer TikTok Employee Review

1.0
May 18, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good office and good company brand i guess.

Cons

You know the saying - "Never meet your heroes"? Yeah, after joining Tiktok, even using the app itself left me a bad taste in my mouth. Culture The culture at the GPRD TA team is super bad. You would think that a giant organization like TikTok is globalised but no. Meetings, documents and conversations are conducted in Mandarin Chinese even if there are people/minorities who do not understand the language. A s someone who first joined the team, I could feel the segregation between the permanent employees and the contract staff. As a contract staff, you are treated like a peasant. On my first day, they gave me a nasty look when I was introduced to them, as if I was an annoyance. Very good first day experience! Diversity & Inclusion This is a joke. As someone who did recruitment in this team, I can tell you that fluency in Chinese is an implicit requirement. Good luck to people with resumes that do not state that outright, because there's a lot of recruitment biases going around. Recruitment Strategy The recruitment strategy for this team is very straightforward. Spam everyone! You know those WhatsApp/Phone scammers? Guess what, this TA team is more persistent than them. Not replying to them out of lack of interest? Expect another message in 1/2 days. Without a doubt, this is a full-on agency environment. Brought in by the lead and maintained by the TA Partners, it's all about the numbers. People are sending random resumes to irrelevant roles just to boost their numbers. Oh and please if you join this team, please please keep track of your candidates that you entered into the system. People are always watching and will snatch from you once the locking period is up. All of this is because of the team culture and focus on numbers. Do well and they will clap for you, "Top Performer of the Month" and then it's back to spamming candidates. Everyone is burnt out and tired, there are a finite number of candidates that fit the criteria. I really doubt software engineers are born into this world every minute with full grasp of their tech stack that can sustain this insane recruitment strategy of spamming people and passing them around positions like their tissue paper.

Explore other reviews about TikTok

2.0
Jun 15, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Pay is level with industry and actual work is somewhat interesting depending on the team you're on

Cons

In my experience, career growth can feel very limited if you are not part of the dominant internal language and cultural network. A significant amount of important context, communication, and decision-making happens in Chinese, which can make non-Chinese-speaking employees feel excluded from key conversations and promotion opportunities. The environment did not feel as inclusive as it should be for a global company. Advancement often felt less tied to performance and more tied to whether you were connected to the right groups or able to operate fluently within the Chinese-speaking side of the organization. Over time, it felt like non-Chinese-speaking employees had fewer long-term career paths and were at risk of being replaced by people who could better fit that internal operating model. Things also move very slowly because employees are often given access only to the bare minimum needed to do their jobs. There is a heavy push toward using AI tools, but in practice it can make it harder to get help from real people. Instead of getting quick support, you often have to spend time going through AI bots or internal tools before getting a useful answer.

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