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Stumbling down the rungs of TheLadders
By Brian | October 15, 2009
As some of you know, I was recently caught up in the downsizing craze that’s hitting America. I had tried the job site TheLadders at one point while semi-seriously looking for a job. Once I had to rely it as a major source of job postings in my job search, I realized that it did a better job hawking itself and its add-ons than in providing the service for which its subscribers paid.
TheLadders is quick to try to sell you on their resume writing service, and they even offer you a free evaluation as one of their marketing tools. Someone named “Alexis James”, who sounds like she belongs in the Vivid stable, performed the free “teaser” resume critique for me. The review sounded terrifically formulaic, as if she was using some sort of form letter or script to craft the critique. She made a serious factual error, commenting about my job history being overly long since it went all the way back to 1983 (when my professional experience would have been courtesy of St. Ann elementary school), but otherwise the review contained a few nuggets of good information in what was overall a pile of poorly written crap disguised as “bluntness”. At the end of the critique, they say that even the company CEO, Marc Cenedella, came to them when he was looking for a new resume. I wonder…did he have to pay upwards of $600 to have it done?
Just for grins, I had a friend of mine who works in a completely different field submit her resume for the free review, and guess what? She received largely the same form letter, with about 95% overlap between my individualized review and hers.
I had a few minor foibles with the site. I was annoyed when I’d have to link to an external employer’s site to complete a job application, filling out yet another profile and uploading yet another resume. This didn’t happen just once or twice, but over the course of my interaction with the site I estimated that I had to do this at least 25-35% of the time. I understand that every company has their own resource management and human resources function, but isn’t this why man invented middleware? Their search function was needlessly labyrinthine. TheLadders is organized into silos by function, with a Technology Ladder, Marketing Ladder, Finance Ladder, HR Ladder, etc. Searching across silos proved to be exceedingly difficult, and absolutely couldn’t be done using a basic search. And if you filled out any information at all in the Basic Search features, and then clicked Advanced Search, you had to fill out the entire form again.
Then I noticed a disturbing trend arising. I’d find a job that looked interesting, submit my application, and…..crickets. So on a few of these jobs, I started following the links to the company’s web sites. I did this for Amtrak, the Pew Charitable Trusts, some NGO in the Arlington area, and I noticed that a number of these jobs that were cross-listed were no longer posted on the company’s own career sections.
In conducting a Google search, I found that I am far from alone in my criticism of TheLadders, their lack of posting maintenance, and their resume writing service. I submitted a complaint to the NY Better Business Bureau, and also fired off this missive via their internal customer support system:
I think your service is a bit of a sham. The only thing TheLadders has successfully managed to do is bombard my inbox with email and try to shill resume & cover-letter writing services. Frequently, over the last few months I have found that jobs posted on TheLadders were expired upon being redirected to an employer’s web site. Additionally, why am I paying to maintain a profile on your site when I frequently have to create a profile and submit a resume on an employer’s site? I have submitted a complaint to the NYC BBB regarding your services.
I received this response from “Greg”, a “community manager”:
Thanks for writing in.
Sorry to hear you feel this way about our site. I assure you it is not a scam and that all of the jobs on our site are 100% real.
Furthermore, we check our jobs each day to ensure that they are still open and available, but some jobs inevitably get filled before we have the chance to remove them from the site. We apologize for the inconvenience in this case. If you ever come across a filled job again in the future, please let us know so that we can remove it from our site immediately.
Moreover, you can expect to find two types of jobs posted on our site. Jobs that recruiters post directly with us and jobs that link you to external companies websites so that you can apply directly through their site. By posting both types of jobs it allows us to pool together all of the $100K jobs on the online market and bring them right to your fingertips, which can save you countless hours of time spent searching.
Please let me know if you have any other questions or concerns and I’ll be happy to personally take care of them. Have a great day!
Best,
Greg
So they check their jobs every day to ensure they haven’t been filled? If this were the case, why were job postings that were weeks old still showing up in search results then the jobs had long since been removed from the employers’ sites? Funny enough, they sent me a customer service survey on my satisfaction with my interaction with “Greg”, if that is indeed his real name. I’m not sure they were prepared for my answer to the question of “What could TheLadders Customer Service team do to improve your satisfaction”, which in typical Unqualified fashion was “Die in a Fire“.
Topics: Red Sea Pedestrian | 4 Comments »
October 17th, 2009 at 8:27 am
Thank you for pointing a finger at The Ladders.
You may be interested in Jason Alba’s post a few months ago, The Ladders Scam (http://www.jibberjobber.com/blog/2009/05/28/the-ladders-scam/)
And take a look at the 60 comments, mostly from careers industry professionals and resume writers who’ve been plagued by those Ladders’ free critiques that lambaste the work of even the very best of us, as a routine part of their resume writing hawking. Many, many overwhelmed executive job seekers have received the same template criticisms. The “reviewers” don’t seem to actually be reviewing the resumes they criticize.
I hope your post helps more people understand what The Ladders is all about and quit wasting time and money over there.
October 21st, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Another ladders scam – really a scam perpetrated by recruiters but aided and abetted by almost all online boards – is posting ideal job descriptions to attract “inventory,” without actual jobs backing up those postings.
November 4th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
[...] Stumbling down the rungs of TheLadders [...]
December 13th, 2009 at 11:27 am
Um…..I work for a large defense company that also does substantial work in the private sector, and I have been involved in recruiting (on the side, when I can afford to timewise…) and the word on the street is that particuliarly in today’s job market, you would be a fool to advertise on the “Theladders.com” (pay for it) or seek jobs there….it’s just another way to make money, real companies have dedicated staff that manage the websites, jobsites and flood of resume’s and CV’s…TheLadders isn’t really doing the industry, especially the 100k+ industry any favors, because anyone that can get into that sort of job, knows how to get another one, if they don’t they just got lucky and shouldn’t be in the ‘cadre’……tenancity and being smart will get you ahead way better than TheLadders…save your money for the dry cleaning.