«
| Ask The Headhunter® | Nick Corcodilos | »
July 15, 2011

Looking for a job in America: Got a flashlight?

Filed under: Heads up, Stuff I worry about

I couldn’t make this stuff up.

A sales director with over 20 years’ experience managing sales teams pays MyJobHunter.com $50 to send out 500 job applications on his behalf. The guy’s wife’s beauty salon receives the resume and calls him for an interview. He didn’t know it, but his “job hunting agent” also submitted him for jobs as a receptionist, manicurist and fitness coach. Then he’s befuddled when a district manager from Krispy Kreme calls about his job application.

A U.S. executive pays JobSerf.com $98, which submits his resume for C-level jobs at porn companies because the team in Visakhapatnam, India that’s handling the job search doesn’t know what “XXX” and “adult entertainment” mean.

A guy in Washington, D.C. pays JobSerf to submit job applications on his behalf to land a job in finance. He gets a call from a company about a job selling playground equipment.

These people are looking for jobs — where?

Sanjay Dasgupta, head of the JobSerf team in Visakhapatnam, says his U.S. clients are to blame. They’re not clear about what they want, so JobSerf sends their resumes to inappropriate employers.

They’re laffing their asses off in India. Maybe this is outsourcing revenge.

A guy in Houston used MyJobHunter to send out so many resumes to the wrong companies that a recruiter who received his resume chewed him out. The guy’s comment? “I’d rather have too many submissions than too few.”

These stories are all reported in The Wall Street Journal: The Unemployed Worker’s New Friend: Outsourcers.

“Occasionally, the sheer abundance of job applications some clients send can spin out of control, forcing the services to cut them off. MyJobHunter’s service was once slowed by a customer who set his parameters so  wide that he applied for more than 20,000 jobs, said Lee Marc, CEO of eDirect  Publishing Inc., which owns MyJobHunter. ‘They’re like junkies,’ said Mr. Marc, who once had a customer apply to  10,000 jobs in a week.

Looking for a job in America: It’s a good idea for an outsourcing business in India, because there are a lot of dummies in America.  But if you sign up, ask for a flashlight, because it’s a long and winding road in there.

(What’s perplexing is that The Wall Street Journal exposes the underside of “paid job-hunting help” by reporting on two-bit companies like JobSerf and MyJobHunter.com — yet avoids the big kahuna in the pay-for-jobs rackets: TheLadders. Well-known for greasing the media channels, TheLadders slips through yet another investigative column about employment practices in the world’s leading business journal. Maybe it’s The WSJ that needs the flashlight.)

.

 

» Posted by Nick Corcodilos on July 15, 2011 at 12:10 pm


2 Comments on “Looking for a job in America: Got a flashlight?”
By Ellen Clark, Clark Executive Search
July 18, 2011 at 11:24 am

Just discovered your blog. It appears to have some very useful advice. I wish the people who send resumes to me would read this post. I clearly state all over my web site that I only recruit MDs and PhD candidates for research and development positions. But I get what I call my McDonald resumes: i.e, those from every industry but the one I specialize in. Of course they haven’t actually read my site and just mass send their resumes anywhere. Such a waste of everyone’s time. I can’t see any way to stop this, can you?

By Nick Corcodilos
July 18, 2011 at 12:21 pm

@Ellen: Years ago there was a company in Kansas City called WSA. You paid them 5 grand and they’d mail 3,000 copies of your resume out. You and I didn’t get bothered very often with such resumes because it cost 5 grand to do it. Now it can be done electronically at no cost (even if the “customer” pays $98), so these “firms” shovel all the crap they can into e-mail… and we get stuck catching it.

My advice: DELETE. And if you had unlimited resources (or a 12 year old who knows how to send e-mail and enjoys this sort of thing), you could send a note to each person whose resume you receive via these “firms” and tell them that since their resume came to you via a paid third party, you’ve put their name and info in your blacklist. Maybe that’ll get the message across. But the real problem is that the cost of entry to this sort of business is so low, there will always be scammers doing it.

Post a comment