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 [...]

I don’t know who I feel more sorry for: Job hunters or employers. LinkedIn has introduced a new button that lets you instantly apply for a job — no resume, no cover letter, no effort. It’s instantly dumber for everyone concerned. (From Mashable: LinkedIn Launches Button That Lets You Apply for Jobs.) The last thing job [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

In the June 14, 2011 Ask The Headhunter Newsletter, a reader asks what percentage of job-hunting time should be devoted to working with headhunters: I’ve heard that headhunters fill less than 10% of open jobs, so one should spend no more than 10% of one’s job hunting time working with headhunters. Do you agree? Also, could [...]

“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 [...]

Any good company will tell you that it loses business sometimes, to unscrupulous competitors who make promises to customers that they can’t keep, and who will quote artificially low prices to win business. The honest company loses money immediately, but it takes time for the naive customer to realize that the promised product at the lower [...]

Beleaguered and battered by the press, by career industry pundits and — mainly — by its own customers, TheLadders recently convened a war council to round up industry “leaders” to defend its flagging reputation. But this little event quickly blew up in TheLadders’ face, and now it’s leaving egg all over TheLadders’ leading apologists, who are beginning to look like paid [...]

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 [...]