laila
03 December 2009 @ 11:56 pm
What a pathetic way to make a living.  
... to borrow a title from Private Eye. Still, it fits.

I'm job hunting in my dreams now. Yesterday I was in a bit of a slump about my continuing lack of paid employment, and went trawling (again!) through the listings at totaljobs.com in an attempt to make myself feel that I was at least doing something toward finding work. My particular personal circumstances mean that there aren't a lot of vacancies I can even think about applying for, and that I'm not too picky about the ones I do apply for just as long as they're vaguely in the right field as regards my long-term career goals (and believe it or not, I do actually have those). I just can't afford to be.

Tonight's little experience, though, has suggested to me that maybe in future it would pay to be just a little bit more discriminating about who I send my personal details off to. Yesterday's slump left me feeling incredibly desperate, and desperate people make themselves incredibly vulnerable.

Luckily for me, I still have one powerful weapon in my arsenal: my natural skepticism.

I only applied for the job at London Marketing Services (hereafter LMS) because it was there. Even as I was sending off the application I thought that the listing seemed rather vaguer than usual about what the position actually involved: all I knew was that it didn't really appear to be what I was looking for, and I wasn't really sure how come it had turned up in a jobsearch for administrative jobs. So straight away I was skeptical - but, as I mentioned, I was also feeling far more desperate than I normally am. I was striking out way more than usual yesterday and I figured I was in no position to turn my nose up at something just because it didn't really sound like my thing:

We are currently working with an established client list that includes some of the biggest names worldwide. Our customer base is continuously growing and we need energetic and goal-oriented candidates to fill EVENT BASED roles in our London office!

Areas we focus in:
  • Sales
  • Event Marketing
  • Customers Service
  • Promotional campaigns
  • Recruitment
Candidates should possess:
  • Great people skills
  • Strong communications skills
  • Positive attitude
  • Creativity
  • Ability to work in fun, vibrant environment!
If you fit the criteria, BRING your energetic, hard-working, professional attitude and the willingness to learn to LMS. Experience with client/customer relations and ability to manage multiple tasks and to work under deadlines will be a definite plus.

For immediate consideration, please forward your CV to the attention of [NAME REDACTED].

We specialize in EVENT marketing (~This is NOT a door to door, business to business, telemarketing or graphic design position)

All formatting is retained. Please note the bold text at the bottom of the listing. This will be important later.

I know, it looks hokey... but to be fair, it doesn't look much more hokey than an awful lot of other totally legitimate listings posted by companies trying far too hard to seem 'modern' and 'fun'. (Hairdressers are especially prone to this.) If I didn't apply for jobs on the grounds that the listings sounded cheesy, I'd never apply for anything. Figuring that maybe the listing was just rather poorly-written, I applied anyway. Might as well, right? A lot of job listings aren't written anywhere near as well as they could be, which always leaves me thinking that if I was working there, I'd never have approved something that was that badly-written. Still, if there were as many scammers out there as there are people who just plain aren't very good at English, we'd all be in trouble.

Long story short, I figured that I had nothing to lose by giving it a go. It wasn't like they wanted me to sell Amway or Cutco kitchen knives after all - and if the company got back to me maybe they’d be a bit more specific about what they actually wanted me to do.

Of course, they got back to me. (Most likely this was because they get back to everyone who applies: once again, I'll be coming back to this in a bit.) My skepticism, though, was aroused by how worryingly quick this response was. I submitted my CV last night, at least an hour after a normal office would have closed. The response came this morning, at 9:48 am. How much thought can really have gone into the 'selection process' that any employer could be getting back to me that quickly?

The answer, of course, is none at all. )

In the case of LMS and the interview I don't intend on scheduling now or ever, it seems that a lot of these employment scams work the same way. They'll interview anyone who approaches them simply because the more people they call for interview, the more people are likely to actually show up.

The interview process itself is, of course, sketchy. I'd go along in person for the laughs if I didn't think that staying in bed would be a better use of my time, but from the accounts I've read the initial interview involves candidates walking in to find loud music playing and twenty or so other would-be dupes in formal clothes filling out application forms, never mind that they already sent in a CV. From there they will be interviewed in pairs. The interviewer will usually talk quickly, discourage applicants from asking questions of their own, and come on more like a salesman than an interviewer. After that, they will be sent away and told to wait to hear back - if they pass the 'initial assessment', they'll be contacted about a second interview, a training day.

All of this - the form-filling, the loud music, the interviewing in pairs - is common to employment scams (Cutco do they exact same thing) and is designed to stop the candidates from talking to one another... and, perhaps, talking about their suspicions of how strange this all is.

As for the 'training day', here's where the scam hits head-on.

Remember that line in the job listing about how this wouldn't involve door to door sales? It's a lie. Even if the candidate is not going directly from house to house, they'll be required to stand there in the street, trying to persuade people to fork out for a cheap, nasty product they didn't want in the first place.

The only criteria to make it to the training day is that the candidate attended the interview and speaks English. Provided they can do that, they'll receive an email telling them to come to the second stage interview, a training day where they follow an adviser around. Wear comfortable shoes, the email warns - what they'll be doing all day is not an interview and is only in the loosest sense of the word training. They will be taken somewhere with an adviser - often to an area they don't know, often by the company so that they can't just up and leave - and will spend the day following them around, watching them try and sell these little boxes of cosmetics in stores and on street corners, telling would-be customers this is a market trial before the same product is available in the shops, where it will cost eight times as much... except it never does, because there's no plans to sell this stuff anywhere but on street corners, and it's not worth the £30 it's going for now. If they last out the day, they'll be offered a job - working on commission alone, with no rights and no benefits.

In short, there is no selection process. The candidates select themselves.

People are constantly dropping out on the way as they find out more about their would-be employers and decide the whole process is sketchy as hell. Candidates drop out before booking an interview; they drop out after initial interviews and never come back for the 'training day'; yet more candidates drop out during the training day after deciding this wasn't the job they thought they were applying for at all; candidates who complete the training day can balk when offered the job if it means more of the same; finally, there are the people who'll take the job, then quit after a few days. That's a lot of attrition, and it leaves behind only those who' for whatever reason, really want to believe this could be for real. Kool-aid, anyone?

Personally, I can't feel upset. I'm too damn glad I spotted this for what it was before I got in any deeper, and too damn sorry for the ones who got burned.

Any further emails from LMS are going straight to the trash. Any calls on the matter will not be answered. To be fair, though, I'm not even expecting they'll bother. They won't miss me; why would they? There'll be another desperate job hunter along in five minutes. I'm just another part of the inevitable attrition, another one who signed up but never showed their face for the course. Plenty more where that came from.
 
 
Current Mood: ahahahahahaha-- NO.
Current Music: la isla bonita - madonna