I have been posting my resume various places, and ran across a site for an executive search firm that allowed candidates to upload their resumes, so added mine. I wasn't expecting much to come of this, so was very pleasantly surprised to have a "talent coordinator" contact me a week or so back. We scheduled a phone interview last week, in which we went over a lot of stuff and he suggested that I might be eligible to be one of their "Featured Candidates", which I had hoped meant that my past 20 months of "cutting edge" work had paid off somewhat.
I was/am scheduled to rent a car and drive out to Naperville for a "mock interview" tomorrow.
The contact there had sent me an e-mail with 8 attached articles that he suggested would be "helpful materials" for me to read in advance of the meeting. I got into those this evening. Each one was a dire prediction of how long it would take to get an executive job, how horrible the job market is for folks my age, and how unlikely it would be for somebody to get a new job at anything near their old pay/responsibility. WTF?
Now, I used to be in Network Marketing. I really sucked at Network Marketing, because it's a business based on emotional pitches, not facts & figures. I'm real good at communicating salient details about products and/or services, but I can NOT do the "act now, or the sky will fall!" pitch. My contact including this particular bunch of articles, was CLEARLY going for the "fear" pitch, with over-tones of the "greed" pitch (in that they promise high-level executive jobs). Which made me take a step back and wonder just HOW it was that I fit in as a "Featured Candidate".
So, I went and googled them, and one of the top four searches for their company name was Company Name SCAM. Not a good sign. Somebody had even set up a blog just for folks to post stories. There were one or two posts on other sites as well, but it seemed to be the same basic posts on multiple sites. It seems that there are several dozen people very pissed off with them, but it's not like there were hundreds
On the other hand, they're all over the place, on various job search sites (Career Builder, Simply Hired, MySpace jobs, employmentspot, even Business Week's site) which you would think might filter off the really bad actors. Plus, the Chicago BBB has them listed as "A+" (despite 20 complaints in the past 36 months).
I'm very torn. On one hand, if they're actually legit, I could certainly use the help, but I hate to spend the better part of a hundred bucks to rent a car to get out there just to subject myself to a hour-and-a-half sales pitch to try to get me to spend hundreds (or thousands if the nasty posts are true) for their various add-on services (despite their assurance that they are a strictly "retained", i.e. employer-paid, agency).
This is bumming me out badly. I think I'll call their offices in the early AM and see if I can talk to my contact there, raise these issues, and see what sort of "smoke signals" I get from his response. I'm not due to pick up the car until 10:30, so if I get creeped out by something I can cancel.
I suppose it's better to KNOW that I might be walking into a scam, but The Wife and I were both very excited about "things being different this time", only to find that they're not (at least in a good way).
Sucks to be me, eh?