Jobseeker Beware

I've settled into an old ritual over the past two weeks or so - every day I come home from work and go onto Monster.com and attempt to find a job that's some way related to marketing or writing (whether it's technical writing, copy editor, internal communications assistant), and located within 400 miles of my US-dwelling girlfriend (400 miles away would still work out at least 4,000 miles closer).

I'm dubious as to how worthwhile a process it is send résumés to whatever companies on the job search engine tick the right boxes - particularly when I'm admitting to them that I require sponsorship to work in the States, but it feels like I'm doing something, and 'something' feels like progress, so I'll bark up that tree for as long as is necessary.

Since 'marketing' is such a bullshitty word, my job search results feature copious amounts of specious companies that engage in 'direct' marketing - a process that involves harassing people on the street, or at their front door with your wares.

It's the same every time, the company has a crummy name, throws around a bunch of vague superlatives talking about how great they are and what a fantastic opportunity working for them is, and features an inappropriately fancy Flash-based website that seems to be an off-the-shelf template lazily adapted for their use. Just have a look at this snippet from the website for Marketing FX:



It's lorem ipsum - placeholder text! They can spend hundreds of words ducking and dodging mentioning what the company actually does, but miss out on these crucial details.

Here are the dodgy businesses with names awful enough for me to remember:

Global Advertising
ID Promotionz
World Class Advertising
Davis Direct Marketing
DDM
Difference Defined Milwaukee

Those six businesses I just listed comprise two different companies - which is pretty effin' dodgy.

Last year, when I was just out of college, and before I was any way discerning about which companies I applied to spammed with résumés, I got in touch with World Class Advertising, and even though the secretary got the name of her own company wrong when writing back to me (she called it "World Class Adverting"), I was excited by the response:

Your resume has been selected as a potential match for one or more of our job openings. You have been selected for a personal interview with one of our managers.

We have recently signed new marketing contracts with an international cosmetics company and 2 major national retailers. As a result, we are currently seeking professionals interested in learning Event Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Promotions and Team Leadership.

What timing, eh? They're after getting some big contracts and need to expand quickly! Since I was invited for an interview, I decided to pay a little more attention to what the company was all about, and that's when the scamminess of the whole affair made itself clear. I Googled 'World Class Advertising Scam' and read a few testimonials from people who were almost duped or were insulted by what an obvious dupe it was.

Unsurprisingly, one year later, worldclassadvertising.net is now offline, but there's no shortage of nonsense to take its place.

After being left a little cold by the description on Monster for Moxy Marketing, I decided to let Google fill in the details, and sure enough what I found was a very legitimate sounding business:

They even had a decent catchphrase! I went back to Monster to apply for work with them when I realised that the company advertised was Moxy - with a 'y'. You dirty homonym-exploiting bastards!

Nowadays, to get the most out of my job-searching time, I've made a habit of googling every company I've even a vague interest in, and if something smells fishy, I throw the word 'scam' in there and see what happens - if you're applying for work online, I recommend you do the same.

Useful websites (in case Google hasn't indexed them when you need the info!):
Rip Off Report
Complaints Board