Monday, October 30, 2017

The Frustration of Unemployment

I fear I've become jaded and bitter in my unemployment. It is, after all, the third time I've been in this position, so I suppose it might be understood. I've noticed that this time around especially, there are a lot more "recruiters" and cold calls this time around. It's like somebody figured out how to make money off of the unemployed. On top of that, a lot more insurance companies have attempted to make me a salesman...here's a hint...not gonna happen.

The latest company to call me might be legitimate, but I'm too suspicious to find out. I get a call from this recruiting company based not in my state and from what I believe to be an overseas call center. I am not making this judgement based on the ethnicity of the caller, but the fact that an hour later I got a call from another person claiming to be from the same company and offering the same job, but from a different phone number (same area code). Prior to the second call, I decided to look up reviews for this company. This is where my spidey-senses start to tingle.

I belong to Glassdoor, which is a pretty decent job search site. They do company reviews there and I looked up this particular company. They had positive reviews and negative reviews as one might expect, but the positive ones made me do a double-take. All of the reviews were in the same format, The header was a job title in quotes, under pros it was one sentence to the effect of, "they are a good company to work for" and under cons it was something like "no complaints so far." The negative reviews are something else entirely and they go beyond a dissatisfied worker.

Most of the time, a complaint about a placement service would involve misrepresenting the job that was offered, the pay was not what they said it would be, the contract was too short, or something else that could fall under the "live and learn" banner. No big deal. Reading reviews for this company, it appears that people have been harassed late in the evening, called in the early morning hours (there are laws against that). Complaints that they don't call back once they get your information (apparently they sell it), and people who have apparently stated that they filed complaints with the FTC. Now, children, I have been upset with recruiters and placement services in the past, but I have never even thought about bringing in a three-letter government agency into the discussion. That was about the biggest thing, but there were some other small things that set me off as well.

When a person does the job of a recruiter, they are normally paid a commission, so it would make sense that even if they work for a company, they would have a presence on LinkedIn. At the very least they come up in a name/company search on Google. These folks don't. They appear to be nameless, faceless cogs in a bureaucratic machine...or they make up fake names and call people based on job board searches.

I suppose that the moment I grew suspicious was when I realized that this seemed too good to be true. When I said what I was looking to make, the actual amount was higher that that. They just needed my updated resume and the reason I was no longer working at my previous job and they could get me applied to this job. Seemed a little too...I don't know...easy?

Anyway, I think I'm going to stick with companies that I have either worked with in the past and are actually local to me. I will also apply to jobs that I find on my own and not take phone calls offering me everything I want.

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