Meet Geoffrey James. He writes a sales blog that will help you land your next job. “When you go job hunting, always remember that you’re selling!” That’s the refrain from job counselors, coaches, resume writers and HR people. I don’t buy it, because “sales” is misunderstood as a task by most people. They think of [...]

Suppose that every time you applied for a job, some guy in a little room checked an Excel spreadsheet and notified the employer: “No interview for this guy. He’s a bum.” It’s already happening. Several years ago I published a series of articles about identity theft via job boards, including a report about Monster.com’s troubling practices [...]

Gimme a break. The Washington Post reports: Monster.com finally vindicated. Say what? Two reseachers, UC Santa Barbara’s Peter Kuhn and UC Denver’s Hani Mansour, asked this question in a study they conducted: Do job hunters who “use the Internet to look for work” spend less time unemployed than job hunters who don’t use the Internet? Guess [...]

You know that rude behavior employers dish your way when they recruit you, cajole you, try to woo you, impress you, and interview you — then won’t return your calls, much less decide whether to hire you? Now it’s happened to a C-level executive, CEO Carol Bartz, who was just fired by Yahoo. While Bartz’s performance, [...]

Today TheLadders folded up its shell game and announced that it’s just another job board. Just last month, TheLadders’ announced its highly-exclusive “Signature” service: “guaranteed job offers” for “qualified” $100k+ job seekers – for $2,500. Then the “Executive Jobs” company started offering its “Premium Service” for just $15. In a press release titled “TheLadders: Now LinkedIn’s number one competitor,” TheLadders [...]

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 [...]

TheLadders just keeps rooting around in its pen for scraps of executive job-board revenue. But this looks like a death rattle. There’s all the posturing: The “executive resume” appetizer business (with a side of free critique) didn’t exactly take off. The promises of “$100k+” jobs that turned into… NOT. CEO Marc Cenedella’s e-mails to his list — which it [...]

Curt Landi was raised in New Jersey, near Thomas Edison’s old laboratories. Landi says he used to sneak into one of the abandonned buildings when he was a kid, and wander around, dreaming of becoming an inventor. In the 1980s, Curt and Susan Landi started their company, Supracor, in a tiny Silicon Valley office. Curt invented flexible [...]

In the May 17, 2011 Ask The Headhunter Newsletter, a reader asks whether what we post on the Net can hurt us. Now that I’m job hunting, I’m taking stock of things I’ve posted around the Net. I wonder if my online writing could hurt my chances of getting hired. I suppose a diligent background [...]

“The ladders is a scam, plain and simple. A class action lawsuit sounds like a good idea.” – TheLadders (former) subscriber Robin Lynn “I’d love to charge them for the amount of my time they wasted.” – Employer Claire Peat, not a customer TheLadders continues to discredit itself while suffering renewed attacks from its own paying [...]