So, my regular LiveJournal readers are all too familiar with my animosity towards things like TheLadders, which has recently included JobFox and a slew of other ripoff-come-lately sites. One of my hopes for taking over The Job Stalker was to have a "bully pulpit" to rant against things, like these scam job boards, that take advantage of the desperate job seeker. Of course, as I've bitched about ad nauseum in here, I've had to reign back on my "personal observations", so I'd sort of had that particular bit of vitriol held in reserve.However, in my unending Twitter reading, I stumbled across a blog post by a high-profile "headhunter" who was calling the President of JobFox to task for some of their sleazier practices, and I checked out a few links that were in that, and suddenly had a context for unleashing my indignation on the offending miscreants!
Using those assorted blog posts as a jumping off point, I was able to pretty much let loose with my opinions, as now I could show (at least to those who bothered to click through on the links) that this was a shared distaste. However, since much of the focus in those other pieces was on the very expensive (and, generally speaking, unnecessary) resume writing side businesses that these sites run, I was able to set up a follow-up some time down the line which can revisit this on that side of things.
Oddly, one of my on-going challenges for those posts is searching out "creative commons" or public domain graphics ... I've frequently spent more time digging through sites in search of an appropriate image than I have writing, editing, formatting, and commenting on the post itself! Today I wanted an image that said "hostage" and had a very hard time finding anything workable. I finally stumbled over a very grainy lo-res image of somebody tied up and gagged, and had quite a lot of fun turning it into a "ransom note" ... see image (or just click on the graphic over there to go to the post and earn me a half cent!).