Golden Staffing LLCReviews of goldenstaffing.com

I’m an EFL instructor currently in China. I have been here since late October courtesy of Golden Staffing. However, despite the decent salary, I’m reminded of why in my 20+ year career I have only ever used a recruiting agency when I first began teaching. I will say that the fault isn’t entirely Golden Staffing. I should have trusted my instincts and ignore their messages, but I had been laid off from my previous job in Saudi Arabia, didn’t get my severance pay, and was desperately searching for work after the academic year had already begun. I was set up with recruiters in China. Although my experience was in the Middle East, I needed a job fast due to the situation I was in. One of the recruiters got me a job teaching “kindergarten” (Notice the quotation marks because at best, it’s a preschool although some would say it functions more like a daycare center.) even though my CV and experience letters from past employers clearly show that most of my experience is in teaching colleges and universities. I was willing to teach high school, but was told high school students and staff expect the teachers to look young, thin, and beautiful, not old and fat. That there should have been a hint to not deal any further with this recruiter if she was going to be that condescending, judgmental and superficial, but desperation can sucker one into doing all kinds to things they wouldn’t otherwise logically do, so I took the abuse. The only other job offers I was getting outside of Golden Staffing offered lower salaries. In hindsight, they probably would have been better for me, but the contracts from them came much later and I couldn’t wait. Now I’ve been at this so-called “kindergarten” for nearly 8 months. I knew I wasn’t going to be grading essays, listening to speaking presentations nor administering exams like the good old days, but most of the day consists of watching the kids, getting them ready for nap time, making sure their clothes are on straight, making sure they share the toys, and 30 minutes of actual teaching time with 30 more minutes of singing time. The director who would maybe qualify as an A2 level English speaker on the CEFR scale kept telling me “you need learn to play with kids!” How silly of me to think that I would be teaching. She kept sending me videos of the ideal kindergarten teacher which happens to be UK based teacher with kids in the UK as opposed to an EFL teacher with Chinese kids who are non-English speakers. She also showed me Chinese videos of one kid with a teacher parroting random words from a picture book or a small group of 4 kids with one teacher; however my class was significantly bigger than 4 kids. If she would like me to break them into groups, the other teachers would need to do other activities with them, but since no one spoke English except for one who just insisted I physically restrain the autistic student so he doesn’t run around the classroom, there would be no way for me to break the kids into small groups to conduct these smaller lessons if I wasn’t going to get any other support. In the mornings, the director has me reading stories to kids who can’t understand them but show up to get a sticker. Four times a week, I have to go to the toddler classes to entertain kids who are barely toilet trained. This would be great for those who have experience and enjoying working with kids in their early years, but then I’m constantly being criticized because I don’t have the experience I never claimed to have. Most of the things I’m told to do, I wonder why they need a foreigner for this. It was around December when I heard that China required teachers to have 2 years experience teaching kindergarten within the past 5 years for foreigners to work there. I never submitted any claim nor evidence that I had 2 years kindergarten experience except for my first jobs back in 2002-2005 which clearly means that my kindergarten experience is not within the past 5 years. I managed to get a work visa because of documentation that shows me working at a kindergarten for 2 years at a time when I was still in Saudi Arabia teaching at a university, Am I going to get in trouble for this? Probably. But why was I hired to do a job that doesn’t meet their government’s standards? Speaking of visas, I wasn’t supposed to come here on a tourist visa and start late October like the recruiter had arranged. Foreigners need a Z visa, not a tourist nor business visa. Another red flag that I stupidly ignored is the fact that the recruiter started shouting more insults at me 3 days before my flight all because I asked her for my flight confirmation. That paled in comparison to the slew of verbal abuse I got from her when I was sick with the flu and was verbally assaulted because of the way I was dressed. Edit:I reached out via Skype twice back in Oct/Nov. Sorry I didn’t reach out daily.