Career Management/Recruiters/Headhunters - potential scam?
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Hi folks,
I am looking for some advise and would like to know if you have any experience of this. I have been contacted by a 'Career Management Solution' company after they found my CV online. Specifically, they sell a service to a professional where they market them to internal databases of FTSE100, FTSE250, DAX, CAC, Fortune500 companies. They note that these are specific databases where senior positions are filled without needing to go to more public sites like Monster.com, LinkedIn, Indeed and others and note that most senior positions are filled in such ways without going 'public'. Specifically, heads of departments and execs use the systems to find who they want and go direct, rather than placing adverts on job boards.
Other services of the solution include services such as:
- Fully sponsor and recommend your skills to several thousand key decision makers
- Market your skills to all relevant and targeted organizations proactively
- Update information for all Applicant Tracking Systems at senior level upwards
- Optimize your skills and content for head-hunter searches
- Add a new Skills Matrix to your online profiles on a weekly basis
- Maintain the ranking of your CV on all associated databases public and private
- Recommend you via multiple executive networks that have requested your details in the last 3 months
- Add you to the upper echelon of senior/exec recruiters as a free candidate (no placement fee attached), saving companies the additional recruitment cost for your appointment
Does this seem legitimate? I have not heard of closed off databases that top companies use rather than headhunters/recruiters, but I do not doubt that this could exist. Either way, this feels like a potential scam. I have only ever been recruited/headhunted which costs the hiring company money due to paying hiring fees to the recruiter/headhunter.
This company however says they do not charge the company but charge the candidate due to the service they provide and managing/promoting the candidate. The cost seems pretty expensive too at just below £1000, which is $1,400 USD.
What do you think? This does feel like a scam to me but I have no experience of these senior jobs or accessing them...
Best,
Jim -
Without more info-
Run. Run away.
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Scam or not, you don't want to pay to be hired. It's on the company that hires to pay recruiters/headhunters. Mark their email as spam, block telephone number, and don't look back.
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I have no experience with "senior" jobs either, but having the candidate pay for this service seems wrong.
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Companies pay lots of money to recruit good people. There is no way any senior level or high technical level person would ever have trouble finding and interviewing for these roles. They are so many out there. If you have a solid resume and work history you will never have an issue finding a role.
So yeah 100% scam and a really blatant one.
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Cheers folks, this is what I suspected. Appreciated as always!
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@Jimmy9008 said in Career Management/Recruiters/Headhunters - potential scam?:
Specifically, they sell a service to a professional where they
Stop right there, it's a scam. Employees don't pay to get hired, and employers would obviously avoid anyone that they caught doing this - it's a way of advertising that you don't feel that you are good enough so you need to look better than you are.
It's the employment equivalent of an SEO scam.
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@Jimmy9008 said in Career Management/Recruiters/Headhunters - potential scam?:
Fully sponsor and recommend your skills to several thousand key decision makers
This is utter BS. No good decision maker would ever, ever, ever allow themselves to be "sold" people to hire. Imagine the CEO explaining to the board that "this guy wasn't qualified, but he PAID someone ELSE to get us to hire him, so we hired him over the endless sea of qualified people we turned down that didn't pay."
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@Jimmy9008 said in Career Management/Recruiters/Headhunters - potential scam?:
They note that these are specific databases where senior positions are filled without needing to go to more public sites like Monster.com, LinkedIn, Indeed and others and note that most senior positions are filled in such ways without going 'public'. Specifically, heads of departments and execs use the systems to find who they want and go direct, rather than placing adverts on job boards.
This is marginally true. They are telling you something essentially factual to mislead you. People in the $200K+ bracket in IT tend to be hired on reputation, not job postings, mostly because they are rarely (if ever) on the market and rarely (if ever) on the market long enough for anyone to hire them that way. Top people tend to be poached, they don't linger unemployed, and move directly from job to job never being avoidable for employers to consider or evaluate.
So knowing the right people is key, whether it is the right people in the industry, the right friends, or the right headhunters. Good headhunters do the poaching and match making. They keep tabs on who knows what, who needs what, who is happy, who is itching for a better job, who could move up, who would be lured by more money or a different location, and they put the players together.
Example: For a long time I was looking for a place in Switzerland, rather than a raise. I had headhunters who knew me, knew Zurich, and would recognize when a position would make sense for me and make introductions. Good headhunters are very different from what you think of as recruiters in the majority space.
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@Jimmy9008 said in Career Management/Recruiters/Headhunters - potential scam?:
Market your skills to all relevant and targeted organizations proactively
This couldn't work. This means nothing different than handing in a pile of resumes that no one wants. Guess where those go (if they even bother to do this.)
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@Jimmy9008 said in Career Management/Recruiters/Headhunters - potential scam?:
Update information for all Applicant Tracking Systems at senior level upwards
This is where things are fake. ATS do exist, but for the fodder jobs, not the executive and senior ones. You don't track your stars, you know who they are. ATS are for the people sending in resumes. The only ATS for the senior people is in the CEO/CFO/CIO's heads.
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@Jimmy9008 said in Career Management/Recruiters/Headhunters - potential scam?:
Optimize your skills and content for head-hunter searches
Again, sounds good, but this is something that applies to the mass market. High end (headhunter level) positions don't do searches, they don't do key words. They are hiring experts based on reputation and connections.
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@Jimmy9008 said in Career Management/Recruiters/Headhunters - potential scam?:
Add a new Skills Matrix to your online profiles on a weekly basis
This isn't a bad thing, but again, it's not for a senior position, it's for mass market positions where HR is just doing keyword searches on Monster or Indeed. You can do this for yourself and actually know that what you put on there is right.
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@Jimmy9008 said in Career Management/Recruiters/Headhunters - potential scam?:
Maintain the ranking of your CV on all associated databases public and private
The what now? The CV ranking?
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@Jimmy9008 said in Career Management/Recruiters/Headhunters - potential scam?:
Recommend you via multiple executive networks that have requested your details in the last 3 months
So you can get hired by people who hire people based on PAID RECOMMENDATIONS? This guarantees that the person hiring you isn't just from the bottom of the barrel, he's the shit stuck to the bottom of the barrel that never even got a chance to see the inside of the barrel.
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@Jimmy9008 said in Career Management/Recruiters/Headhunters - potential scam?:
Add you to the upper echelon of senior/exec recruiters as a free candidate (no placement fee attached), saving companies the additional recruitment cost for your appointment
Right, so they claim that since you pay the $50,000 fee instead of the company, that the company won't get charged and will hire you based on you literally having paid the company to hire you!
While companies might be thrilled to have their employees pay them, obviously they also know that absolutely no one capable of doing the job would ever do this and this would flag you as being the absolutely most undesirable candidate in the history of candidates.
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@Jimmy9008 said in Career Management/Recruiters/Headhunters - potential scam?:
I have not heard of closed off databases that top companies use rather than headhunters/recruiters, but I do not doubt that this could exist.
There isn't, the "closed off database" is the one from REAL headhunters.
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@Jimmy9008 said in Career Management/Recruiters/Headhunters - potential scam?:
This company however says they do not charge the company but charge the candidate due to the service they provide and managing/promoting the candidate. The cost seems pretty expensive too at just below £1000, which is $1,400 USD.
That's an itty, bitty fraction of the cost that the companies pay. So this means that the math alone doesn't make sense. How could these guys make money. Sure, good headhunters do really, really well. But that's because they place something like 90% of the executive level staff out there. These guys are claiming to only be going after some tiny sliver of a percentage of the market, while doing so at a tiny percentage of the pay? Doesn't add up. If they were legit, they'd hardly make a penny.
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@scottalanmiller said in Career Management/Recruiters/Headhunters - potential scam?:
@Jimmy9008 said in Career Management/Recruiters/Headhunters - potential scam?:
Update information for all Applicant Tracking Systems at senior level upwards
This is where things are fake. ATS do exist, but for the fodder jobs, not the executive and senior ones. You don't track your stars, you know who they are. ATS are for the people sending in resumes. The only ATS for the senior people is in the CEO/CFO/CIO's heads.
Yeah I agree. Once you get to a certain level, you don't deal with ATS at all.
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@scottalanmiller said in Career Management/Recruiters/Headhunters - potential scam?:
@Jimmy9008 said in Career Management/Recruiters/Headhunters - potential scam?:
This company however says they do not charge the company but charge the candidate due to the service they provide and managing/promoting the candidate. The cost seems pretty expensive too at just below £1000, which is $1,400 USD.
That's an itty, bitty fraction of the cost that the companies pay. So this means that the math alone doesn't make sense. How could these guys make money. Sure, good headhunters do really, really well. But that's because they place something like 90% of the executive level staff out there. These guys are claiming to only be going after some tiny sliver of a percentage of the market, while doing so at a tiny percentage of the pay? Doesn't add up. If they were legit, they'd hardly make a penny.
Yeah placement fees can be $50k or more easily
