I know this is an old post but I thought you’d might enjoy the transcript from a chat with TheLadders – needless to say they do not verify that the positions they post are $100K+ – though that is their tagline!!!!

Alishia: Hi Andy
Alishia: I have a problem
Andy: Sorry to hear that Alisha, how can I help?
Alishia: I found this job on your website: XXXX
Alishia: and after spending time researching the company, writing a letter and resume
Alishia: when I got a call from the hiring manager
Alishia: he tells me this position pays $50K
Alishia: and when
Alishia: I asked him why he posted the position on The Ladders
Alishia: he said he DID NOT POST IT on TheLadders
Alishia: so
Alishia: I am very concerned
Alishia: about the time and effort and money I am spending
Alishia: using your site
Andy: Okay Alishia, I can definitely understand why you’re concerned about this and I’d be glad to explain.
Alishia: if you are pulling ads from a third party
Alishia: without verifying the salary range
Alishia: ok – please explain
Andy: First of all, we make no claims that all of our jobs are submitted directly to us. Many of the positions on our site are linked directly to from external job boards. Since we don’t have a direct way of knowing the pay range of each of these positions, we make an estimate based on a rigid set of criteria.
Andy: In this case, I see that the position requires a Bachelor’s degree and five years of experience. This is well within the experience range of a Marketing Manager who expects to make $100k per year.
Andy: Clearly that isn’t the case with this position and I thank you for letting me know about it as I am definitely going to remove it from the site immediately.
Alishia: omg… so you mean that you are taking educated guesses on what these positions pay??? do you think that is what users think who pay $30 per month to use your product – that you are paying for good guesses as to what a position MAY pay???
Andy: These aren’t educated guesses Alisia, it is information gained through lengthy information gathering sessions among numerous recruiters and career advisors in all of the fields we post.
Alishia: i understand pulling from third parties but don’t you verify these postings by calling the company or something?
Andy: The fact is Alishia that very few companies are willing to release this information if they havent chosen to do so on the posting itself.
Alishia: Well, Andy, I mean…it’s YOUR tagline: The most $100k+ jobs, all in one easy-to-search site. Our mission has always been to make your job search as quick and easy as possible. We work hard to bring you the best $100k+ jobs around — over 25,000 a month!
Andy: I stand by that statement Alishia and assure you that we make every possible effort to ensure that all of our positions pay $100k+
Alishia: I think you cannot guarantee this claim if you do nothing to verify your information. It is totally irresponsible to make a claim you cannot backup.
Alishia: Needless to say I am very disappointed and feel that I have wasted hundreds of dollars using your site and will be sure to let my colleagues know about my experience.

I don’t think many people “get” what’s happening with TheLadders. I agree with your assessment. Once they start charging employers and recruiters, activity will drop. People will pick low-hanging fruit if it’s there – but it won’t be low-hanging once a fee is imposed. I also agree with your suggestion that job hunters should spend no more than 5% of their time on the boards. But headhunters shouldn’t spend much more than that, either.

If I’m an employer, and I know a headhunter is using Ladders to find candidates, what am I paying him for?

Many execs come to me for advice, which I give for free if I like them. I did find that a surprising number had gotten results from responding to Ladders postings – particularly with getting interviews for real jobs for searches conducted by retained search firms, both small and large. This surprised me, but I started to recommend that senior execs who were actively looking that they sign up for Ladders, because $180 a year isn’t a lot when the result could be a job paying $225K, and it takes little effort (job boards are worth the effort as long as you don’t spend more than maybe 5% of your job hunting time on them, I think – most job hunters spend half their time trolling the internet, which is a mistake).

Ladders always charged only the job hunter – recruiters and employers could post jobs and mine resumes for free.

However, as of August 1, 2008 (new users were charged this back in 11/2007, but existing users were given a grace period), Ladders will charge employers and recruiters $4500 to $10,000 a year to use their service and dig for resumes or post jobs to Ladders’s job-seeking members – while they continue to charge job hunters their $30/month. My guess is that their members will see a lot less activity from potential employers and recruiters starting August 1.

You’ll then receive a worksheet to provide the resume writers with material. This worksheet is so bush-league, words can not do justice to how amateur and unprofessional this process is:

1. The resume critique will rip you to shreds (which is okay) — they’ll pepper the critique and future correspondence with smileys so not to hurt anyone’s feelings.

2. The worksheet they send will say “Please email your old resume with your completed worksheet.” Huh, don’t you already have it? How did you do the critique then?

3. The worksheet will also say, “so I have everything from you in one email”. Huh? You cannot attach multiple documents from the Ladders website. Clients cannot send everything in one email!

4. The worksheet might as well have been developed in crayon. There is such a mix of font sizes, styles, highlighting, tabs, and paragraph marks that it makes me car sick just trying to work with it. One would think that for $600+ that this orgnaization could put together a form with data entry fields and a consistent flow of text.

5. After you send the worksheet in, they will send you follow-up questions. They make it seem like the questions are custom tailored to your worksheet responses. They’re not… the follow up questions are the same questions they send to all their clients.

When you receive your resume, you’ll find that you wrote it. Yep… about 95% of the text on your $600+ resume is taken directly from: your old resume (which mind you was ripped to shreds during the resume critique), your worksheet, and your responses to the phony “follow-up” questions.

Marc Cenedella has quite a racket going… dupe people on a job search into spending over $600 for the privilege re-writing their OWN resume. To be fair, the website appears to be honest and provide a valuable service — but the resume writing aspect of The Ladders is nothing but a SCAM!!!

Bill: Thanks for the Fast Company link. When I got out of grad school, I joined a small search firm in Palo Alto. During training, the owner said to me, “Avoid HR at all costs, because they don’t fill jobs. They push paper.” I was startled, but quickly learned how right she was. While I know some very good HR folks who can run circles around other managers and headhunters, in general HR is the biggest bureaucracy in most companies. Your characterization of the HR recruiter is apt. In the sales world, they are akin to order-takers: people who sit by the phone waiting for someone to call. They do nothing on their own. Calling them recruiters is like calling the hospital gurney handler a surgeon. I’ll tell you how to recognize a good HR recruiter (there are some): They live in the department for which they recruit. They live there and work among the staff, absorbing the dept’s business. They really recruit. The rest of them are unnecessary overhead. There is software that will run ads and hire external recruiters. Your point about shilling for the job boards is right on the money: HR execs get wined and dined by the big boards, and that’s where the recruiting budget goes. But don’t just blame HR. The board of directors deserves the biggest salvo: They fail to pay attention to where their recruiting dollars go.

Until recently I worked in the IT department of a large firm, with a pretty large staff and freqent hires, mostly technical. But even the time or two I needed to hire a skilled non-technical person, the “dedicated” recruiter – who actually knew NOTHING about our business, our positions or the skill sets we needed – first resorted to job boards to recruit (cross-charging our department, if you can believe that) for the cost of the online ads. Then, having delivered no candidates, he wanted to hire an outside recruiter at an exorbitant cost.

What, pray tell, was HIS job as a “recruiter?”
Evidentoly, to shill for the job boards and recruiters and funnel the firm’s money to them, even as he was drawing a generous salary.

It’s no wonder HR is most hated and useless department in any business. Speaking of, this article from Fast Company offers some further insight to the “people profession” (yack)

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/97/open_hr.html