Amikom

Friday a really strange thing happened. My 90 year old grandmother joined Facebook. What does that mean to me? What does that mean to online marketers?

One Month Free

Absolutely. I’ll give you one month free to prove I am the right person for the job, but you’ll know in less than two weeks. Would you do it?
The Real “Apprentice”

When “The Apprentice” hit prime time several years ago, my friends used to joke about how I should go on. Right now, that doesn’t seem like a bad idea. Move over Joan Rivers and Denis Rodman, Nina Leon is here to prove she should have the job.
Prove It Liar

In a flooded job market where over half of resumes (some numbers I’ve seen go as high as 75%) contain untruths and the sheer number of co-jobseekers is unfathomable, even when you know you are great, will a potential employer ever have the opportunity to see your spectacularity? Maybe it’s time to take the free sample approach.
The Irresistible Free Sample

One of the biggest lures in marketing is the free sample. How can you resist? There’s no need to. It’s free. The whole concept being that once you’ve had that free sample, you won’t have a clue how you’ve lived all these years without the product. As a regular at Trader Joe’s, my shopping cart has frequently been victim to the food free sample. It has been very rare that my husband has not purchased whatever food was the freebie of the day. You try it. You like it. You buy it. It’s time this be applied to jobs as well.
Prove Yourself… For Free

As anyone who has ever been in the hiring seat will tell you, some people just interview well. Once they start working, you realize they may not have been the best choice. If everyone had to work the first 2-4 weeks for free in order to prove themself, would we see the same situation? Would free workers quickly realize it was not them but the employer who had misrepresented themself and choose to leave on their own? Do you love your work enough to do it for free?
My Offer

I do. Here’s my offer:

* One quick learner with 10 years of expertise maximizing technology, data, image, time, and staffing resources, consistently exceeding expectations.
* Specialties include Photoshop, HTML, Filemaker, strong web and business writing skills, digital imaging, web content creation and management, product photography, advertising and marketing – online, email, and print.
* Free for one month if a full-time position is waiting on day 32. If you don’t love Nina Leon so much that you want to pay her before the month is up to make sure she stays, day 32 she’s out the door, no questions asked.

Interested?
Would you do it?

Great Answer as to How I will Find My Next Job… Where are you?

So as I was browsing blogs and the Twittersphere yesterday waiting for the great answer as to how I would find my next job to pop in my head, and I came across Twitter Should Hire Me and Jamie Varon’s unconventional method to try to land a job at Twitter.
Mmmm… Cookies

After introducing herself to Twitter’s Hiring Manager by stopping by with cookies, Jamie created TwitterShouldHireMe.com and leveraged social media to get noticed. Her campaign is now in full force and she is quickly becoming this week’s Skittles. David Meerman Scott take notice, Jamie’s creating a World Wide Rave.

She asked everyone to help her, and with the exception of some haters, a lot of us were more than happy to oblige. Yesterday, www.TwitterShouldHireMe.com had 15,000 page views. She’s getting a job somewhere.
Blog Applications?

Damn. I think this chick just raised the bar really high for all of the job searchers who have grown weary from the black hole of online job applications. Will we all need to create a separate blog for each job we apply to? Actually, that’s not a bad idea. It would probably take as long as filling out an online job application and writing a targeted cover letter anyway.

Hey, great answer as to how I will find my next job, are you planning on popping in my head anytime soon? This one is already taken.
Jamie, Don’t Forget to Tweet from the Inside

Do her a favor, keep the message going. Blog it. Tweet it. Tell the execs at Twitter about it. Jamie, keeping my fingers crossed for you. Don’t forget to Tweet once you’re on the inside.

Great Answer as to How I will Find My Next Job… Where are you? So as I was browsing blogs and the Twittersphere yesterday waiting for the great answer as to how I would find my next job to pop in my head, and I came across Twitter Should Hire Me and Jamie Varon’s unconventional method to try to land a job at Twitter. Mmmm… Cookies After introducing herself to Twitter’s Hiring Manager by stopping by with cookies, Jamie created TwitterShouldHireMe.com and leveraged social media to get noticed. Her campaign is now in full force and she is quickly becoming this week’s Skittles. David Meerman Scott take notice, Jamie’s creating a World Wide Rave. She asked everyone to help her, and with the exception of some haters, a lot of us were more than happy to oblige. Yesterday, www.TwitterShouldHireMe.com had 15,000 page views. She’s getting a job somewhere. Blog Applications? Damn. I think this chick just raised the bar really high for all of the job searchers who have grown weary from the black hole of online job applications. Will we all need to create a separate blog for each job we apply to? Actually, that’s not a bad idea. It would probably take as long as filling out an online job application and writing a targeted cover letter anyway. Hey, great answer as to how I will find my next job, are you planning on popping in my head anytime soon? This one is already taken. Jamie, Don’t Forget to Tweet from the Inside Do her a favor, keep the message going. Blog it. Tweet it. Tell the execs at Twitter about it. Jamie, keeping my fingers crossed for you. Don’t forget to Tweet once you’re on the inside.

Perfect Job. Great Pay. Business Practices?

So what do you do when a recruiter approaches you regarding the perfect job, or better yet several high paying perfect jobs, but a quick Google search reveals serious questions regarding the company’s business practices? Pursue the positions or pass?
Creative Networking or Cyber Stalking?

So I received a message in my Facebook Inbox one night from a recruiter who had seen my profile on LinkedIn and wanted to contact me regarding a few positions I might be a good match for. I know that LinkedIn offers paid options allowing you to contact members you are not linked to, so I found it a little odd and a lot cheap that he had contacted me through Facebook instead. With both hope and hesitation, I responded and he started sending the jobs through. They were great. Amazing positions. Exactly what I had been dreaming of!
Would you like my Credit Card Number along with my Social Security Number?

So he also emailed a request to fill out a job application, available online as a PDF and for a copy of my resume. I emailed my resume after verifying the company as much as possible. He had several recommendations on LinkedIn and searching for the company online, all looked fine. I opened the application, began to fill it out, and stopped. Did this application seriously ask me for my social security number? What do I do? I had heard absolutely to give out my social security number only if I was filling out a job application in person. I also know that email is not secure which is why you should never email a credit card number or social security number. I stared at it for a few minutes, skipped that part and went on with the rest of the application. The rest of the application was pretty standard, just some position names, dates, job addresses, and references at the end. No big deal. What could someone do with this information? I kept debating about the identity-theft-ability of the information and concluded it was a risk I was willing to take, but the social security number was not getting filled in. So feeling very uncertain, I emailed the job application and we arranged to speak at 10am the next morning.
Great, Growing Company, Top Rated… oh yeah, and if you’re offered a job, you better take it

So I tried to call the recruiter at 10am, as we had discussed, and just ended up with voicemail. Panic started up immediately and I was sure my bank account would be drained within the hour. Something just seemed weird. A few minutes later the phone rang and I was a little more at ease. We discussed the positions and everything kept sounding better and better. Salary started where I left my last job at and went up from there. The company was growing and had been for years. Classmates.com was one of their big clients and Buy.com just made a deal with them. They were acquiring other companies and they were on this list and that list of “great” or “growing” or “to watch” web companies to work for. He told me the name of the company and asked me to write a paragraph stating why I would be great for one or all of the jobs. He would forward the paragraph with my resume to the company.

Oh yeah, this was also the worst market he’d seen in years and if I was offered a position, I really needed to take it.

Was that a threat or a warning?
Oh, you trick people. Good to know that makes a fast growing web business.

So I look through the company website. It appears they make money for all their clients and give free things to customers. Mmmm…. and you do that how? All I could find was that you needed to have a shopping cart and the ability to add scripts to your pages. Not a big deal, that’s true of affiliates and any site that needs to track your sales information for CPA, like Microsoft Live Cashback. But funny, I still can’t tell what you do.

Let’s check Google, shall we?

So Google’s top 10 revealed some interesting information. Ripoff Report, Consumer Reports, and a CBS investigation all showed up and offered some informative reading.

Still attempting to give the benefit of the doubt, I checked the Better Business Bureau. The BBB gave them a C rating and showed over 1500 complaints in the past 36 months. Wow. Reading through the BBB report and after reading the other information I had found, I now had an idea of what the company did. In fact, my husband had learned about the business model firsthand the week before.

I will state that I was not able to connect the business that my husband dealt with to the company I was looking into, which is why I have not named them here. However, the only website my husband has ever entered his credit card information into is Classmates.com and the business practices seem to be unmistakeably similar. In addition, the state listed on his credit card statement just happened to be the same state the job was located in.

So what happened to my husband? He received his credit card statement and looking through it, noticed two charges for $19.99 that he did not recognize. He called them to find out that it was an identity protection subscription that he had been paying for for a few months and the company agreed to refund all charges.

When did that happen? The way it works is a consumer fills out a rebate form or clicks YES to get something free and their credit card information is passed from the website to this third party company without the consumer entering their credit card information again. They are now a subscriber to a discount or protection program. They just don’t know it yet. If anything gives e-commerce a bad name and is still legal, this would be it.
E-Commerce Best Practices? Uh… no

I have spent the past few years learning e-commerce best practices. These were not them. I quit my job over 2 months ago and these jobs paid really well. Could I do it? I needed to write a paragraph selling myself and explaining why I would be a good fit for the company. Was I?
You must mean the lawsuit

After extensive thought, I knew I couldn’t do it. Unfortunately for my bank account, I was way too ethical to work for a company I felt had questionable business practices. So I emailed the recruiter to let him know I had looked into the company and was not interested. His reponse was quite amusing.

He called me a few times the next day leaving messages. (I was busy all day interviewing for other positions.) The first message let me know that I was not the first person to have responded that way and he wanted a chance to explain. The second message said that I had found misinformation online and he wanted to clarify. The third message was the best. He said that I must mean the lawsuit and that it was frivolous. He then sent an email with more information regarding the lawsuit. The lawsuit? What lawsuit? You must be kidding. Oh, now I knew I had made the right choice.
Thanks, but not for me

I called him back and he was trying to convince me to keep an open mind. The most ethical people he knew worked there in executive positons. He had placed several people there over the past years. I explained to him more than once that due to my husband’s recent experience, I really wasn’t interested. He didn’t get it. Dude, let it go.
It appears you may be a fit…

The next day, I received an email from someone else at the same recruiting company regarding a position with the same title. She thought I may be a fit.

I let her know I’m not.