Archive for the 'Heads up' Category


Looking for a job in America: Got a flashlight?

Friday, July 15th, 2011

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: A lipstick pig’s death rattle?

Monday, June 27th, 2011

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 [...]


Unemployment & Poverty: A choice American companies make

Friday, May 20th, 2011

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 [...]


Your Internet Leavings: Do you leave a mess?

Monday, May 16th, 2011

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 [...]


TheLadders: How the scam works

Monday, May 9th, 2011

“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 [...]


Work for free, or no interview for you!

Monday, January 24th, 2011

One of my favorite job-advice pundits is The Evil HR Lady, Suzanne Lucas, who calls ‘em as she sees ‘em. In her current post, Job Interview or Bake-Off?, she deals with the subject of employers who tease job hunters with interviews… if only they will do some free work first. Say what? It happens more [...]


TheLadders’ Marc Cenedella: Burying the pig

Monday, January 17th, 2011

Not content to promise more than he can deliver, and still happy to charge money for nothing (that you can’t get elsewhere for free), TheLadders’ CEO Marc Cenedella conducts an inspection of his members with his latest missive: “So my colleagues here at TheLadders and I want to make your job search strategy as attractive [...]


Whorin’ around with TheLadders

Tuesday, January 11th, 2011

For a while it seemed TheLadders had gotten down off its lame horse, and stopped claiming it offers “ONLY $100k+ jobs.” (If you believe TheLadders really has only $100k+ jobs in its little database, have a look at what its members disclose about their experiences.) Indeed, the “ONLY” has been missing on its home page [...]


Readers’ Forum: Headhunters & Job Hunters: The insanity continues

Monday, January 10th, 2011

In the January 11, 2011 Ask The Headhunter Newsletter, two readers raise related questions about headhunters and job hunters. (My short version of their questions is, Are these people insane?) But take a look for yourself: Reader #1 asks: I found the article, How to Judge Headhunters, to be one of the best I’ve seen a some [...]


TheLadders: A long-shot Powerball lottery tucked inside a well-oiled PR machine

Monday, November 15th, 2010

During a recent webinar I conducted for Harvard Business School alumni (November 3, 2010, Can you stand out in the talent glut? Discussion here, and more audio here), we considered that one of the key hindrances to standing out is job boards, especially TheLadders. What does TheLadders do to enhance anyone’s job hunting prospects — especially C-level executives? [...]