Facing unemployment after 6 years of experience, operations: "Black hat" has ruined me!

As the weather gradually warms up, the cross-border recruitment market is becoming increasingly hot.

As the saying goes, March is the golden season and April is the silver season. Now is the peak season for recruitment, and the cross-border industry is no exception. Just after the Spring Festival holiday, many cross-border companies have started to recruit people frantically, and operators are also gearing up and always looking for better opportunities.

6 years of operation experience but can't find a job, just because of "black technology"

After the first week of March, many operations staff are lamenting that more positions are being recruited recently, and the industry seems to be heating up again. Many people have also posted their offers, and the figures in the salary column really make many colleagues envious.

However, some are happy while others are worried. Recently, Amazon operations manager Xiao Tang complained that it was too difficult to find a job. It is understood that Xiao Tang has been in the industry for 6 years and has always performed well. It stands to reason that finding a job should not be a difficult task.

However, Xiao Tang interviewed with many companies but nothing happened. In Xiao Tang’s own words, it was his own “experience” that harmed him.

According to Xiao Tang, he has been engaged in the red ocean category for six years, and the average customer spending is tens or hundreds of dollars. In terms of strategy, he tends to use various "black technologies", such as "zombies", "mirrors" and "smurfs", and has always found ways to avoid risks.

Some colleagues thought that Xiaotang was very good at mastering these methods, but only Xiaotang himself understood the embarrassing situation he was in. During the interview process, the employers were basically not interested in these "black technology" methods, and the other party was not satisfied with Xiaotang's answers to many questions.

In an interview, the interviewer asked Xiao Tang how to advertise if the price of a new product is less than 10 US dollars and the bidding price is 1-2 US dollars? What other promotion methods are there? This series of questions caught Xiao Tang off guard. Only then did she realize that without the so-called "black technology" methods, she had no confidence in launching new products.

Before, Xiao Tang always believed that white hat tactics did not require much technical content and mainly relied on product quality, which depended on the company's supply chain and product development capabilities, and there was very little room for operations.

But now, reality has poured cold water on Xiao Tang, and her recent interview has made her dumbfounded. In order to find a job, Xiao Tang has to make a choice. One is to give up the experience accumulated from the previous "black technology" approach and choose a white hat company, but in this case, she will have to learn all over again, and the salary will definitely not be comparable to before. Or continue to look for a company that accepts black hat tactics, but there are very few such companies now, after all, there is the risk of being blocked.

Xiao Tang hasn't made a decision yet. She plans to interview more companies first, maybe she can find some opportunities.

Under the pressure of account blocking, cross-border companies began to "turn from black to white"

Unlike the wild development period of cross-border e-commerce, now more and more cross-border companies have turned their attention to long-term development and started to pay more attention to compliance operations.

The main reason why most buyers “turn white” is the pressure from platform review and the risk of account suspension. Buyer L is one of them.

According to L, he had been working on white hats, but he saw many of his peers in the same category were doing tricks. At first, L was very angry and denounced these people for destroying the industry ecosystem, but after learning about their profits, L was also tempted.

But after the actual experience, L found that those black hat days were actually the darkest. He couldn’t even sleep well. The first thing he did every day after waking up was not to check the number of orders, but to see if the account was still there.

As an asset-heavy industry, Amazon is already under great financial pressure from stocking up, and black hat operations will undoubtedly further increase people's pressure and psychological burden . L believes that white hat operations do require more patience and thinking than black hat operations, and the promotion cycle will be longer, but white hat operations are more practical, and the profits are actually very good after persistence.

Black hat sellers have always believed that no matter whether it is white hat or black hat, as long as they can make a good product, it is a "good hat". Different ways of playing represent different risk resistance. Playing black hat requires bearing the corresponding consequences, and playing white hat requires enduring a protracted war. No matter which method is used, as long as you can make money in this set of playing methods, it's fine.

But after experiencing the wave of account bans in 2021, these people began to realize the seriousness of the problem. Millions of funds were blocked, nearly a thousand listings were all removed from the shelves, and it only took a moment for the company to go bankrupt.

After this incident, all the sellers who are still alive have turned to white hat tactics without exception. One operator said that after the account blocking wave, the company began to require learning white hat knowledge, and after getting in touch with it, they found that white hat is still better, not only safer but also can improve the overall ability of operations.

However, after experiencing the "transformation from black to white", operators still face pressure from other aspects, and age anxiety is one of the topics that is often mentioned.

The older you are, the more popular you are, but this does not hold true in the cross-border industry?

In the cross-border circle, many people believe that Amazon operations is a job that only young people can do, and that they will soon be replaced by younger operations staff when they get older.

On major social media platforms, there are many topics about operators considering changing careers at the age of 30. One question everyone is asking is, where do Amazon operators go after they turn 30?

It seems that apart from switching to management, the only option left is to work alone. Operations professionals aged 30+ who are still working on the front line have become "rare animals" in the workplace.

On the other hand, many big sellers are now beginning to embrace the AI ​​era and are applying AI tools on a large scale in their work, which further compresses the space for operations and indirectly reduces the importance of operations to the company.

Some operators even joked that after working for three years, they are still newbies when they return! This seemingly self-deprecating statement actually reveals the bitterness behind a lot of operations.

Nowadays, some "older" operators are already looking for a way out for themselves in advance. Among them, Temu and TikTok have become the focus of many operators recently.

As the two most popular e-commerce platforms in 2024 , the recruitment demand of many cross-border e-commerce companies for these two platforms is also increasing, which provides a good career change idea for those operators with certain experience.

Some companies even want to recruit operators who have experience in platforms such as Temu, SHEIN and TikTok, and the salary packages are very attractive. Therefore, operators can look for opportunities to get in touch with as many new platforms as possible. After all, more skills are better than less, and doing so can add new chips to their future career planning.

Amazon

operations

Black Hat