So, while I try to get my sites earning a "full time income", I've been on the job hunt, mostly looking for a 6-12 month contract, but open to a "perm" position. After the commercials for CareerBuilder on the Superbowl, I thought I'd post a resume there.

The first "shock" was that they try to upsell you on resume visibility. According to their marketing materials, a regular resume submission only has "9%" visibility. To get "92%" visibility, you need to pay them $150 a month for enhanced placement. Then they offer an additional resume distribution service for $60+ and a resume consultation for $169-269 depending on the type of job you're seeking. So if you're really desperate, they'll prey on that to grind nearly $500 out of you.

Not interested in paying any of those fees, nor that desperate (yet), I posted a basic resume for free.

Stupidly, when it asked me how many years of experience I'd had, I said 11 in "Journalism and Media", 1 in "Sales". Looks like that 1 year (almost) of selling TVs at Circuit City won me 4 offers to interview for positions as an insurance salesman within 24 hours.

I don't even mention my sales experience on my resume, both because it's over 10 years ago, and because in many positions like insurance, you spend your days prospecting. I've always hated sales jobs that involve prospecting.

But rather than read my resume, these recruiters just pull up a list of people who mention any sales experience and carpet bomb them. This is the new age of prospecting and the reason I hate prospecting. I don't just dislike the rejection, I dislike the fact that you have to annoy people who don't want to hear from you.

So I took sales off my experience list, but the spam continues. Day three and now I've received a spam from a firm that wants $39 to distribute my resume plus a pitch from CareerBuilder pimping their own distribution service less than two hours later.

Three days and so far the results of my posting a resume on CareerBuilder have been spam and offers to interview for jobs selling insurance. Not promising.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 1:43 am and is filed under Success. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.