Hire Ground

A slight detour through job fairs and outplacement companies before we get to networking.

I attended a job fair that was getting a lot of coverage and hype in the local paper, the San Jose Mercury News. It was held at the Santa Clara Convention Center. All of which made me think that there would be a lot of companies there.

I was surprised and disappointed that there were only about 20 companies of which only half were high tech. And this is in Silicon Valley.

Of the 10 high tech companies.......

Two were government contractor type of companies both of which were looking for people with Top Secret clearances. One was accepting resumes for a program management position even if you didn’t have a clearance. The other wouldn’t accept resumes for the same position unless you held an active Top Secret clearance.

How very governmental. And people want to put the bureaucrats in charge of health care. Ah well. No politics in this blog.

And these two were also the only ones advertising jobs that I was interested in.

Two of the booths in the high tech area were for associations. One for Chinese engineers and one for Hispanic engineers. No hope for me there.

There was one other booth that I stopped by. It appeared to be a recruiting company. They were happy to see me and promised to contact me within the next two days, which they did.

It was what is called a retail outplacement firm.

I was invited to a meeting three days after the job fair. Impressive. They’re moving quickly. Since my job search isn’t moving, it was refreshing to have something happening. It looked promising.

It was an odd meeting. They interviewed me to see if I was a suitable client for them. They answered few questions, saying that I had to go through an initial screening. If I made the cut, there would be a second meeting where all would be revealed.

The questions asked were good and to the point. They seemed to be very organized. All in all, an impressive display of efficient professionalism.

As the interview drew to an end, I was assured that I would make the cut and then an appointment was made for the second interview.

That’s when it began to feel like a time share pitch. I had to bring my spouse to the second meeting. Couldn’t have it any other way. They wanted to make sure that she was on-board. Horror stories of job offers rejected because the spouse wasn’t in agreement with were offered.

Further research with my cousin who has a career coaching business revealed that most retail outplacement companies offer to get you contacts, but rarely produce them. And they charge $2000-$3000 for their services.

One of the things about my initial interview with them was a refusal to discuss any of the mundane business aspects of what they were offering. In other words I walked out with no idea of what they would charge me, exactly what they would do for me and what guarantees I would have on their performance.

Now the people I talked to may be completely legitimate, But I don’t know.

I canceled the follow up interview.

PS. For those smart enough never to have signed up or accepted a time share pitch, I’ll explain. Typically the whole process starts with something like a nice high end car sitting in the local mall with a drawing to win it. You fill out a card and drop it in the box. Days later, you get a call asking if you indeed signed up for the drawing on the car. You are told that unfortunately you didn’t win, but you’re invited to a presentation about time share vacation homes around the world. Lots of times they offer a great prize that is guaranteed. You are locked in a room and pitched to buy into a time share vacation home (one bedroom apartment) for what seems an eternity (but it’s really only 1-2 hours). Then you find out that your promise prize of a multi-person white water raft is really a large ring of plastic about the size of a truck inner tube worth about $5.