Still at the Fair

In my first post about job fairs, I noted that you will spend lots of time being told to go to the company’s website and apply for various jobs online. This may not sound like a good use for your time, since you could easily have done this without ever attending the job fair in the first place. In fact, there were at least five companies at the MSU job fair I attended last week to which I had already applied (most of whom hadn’t even bothered to acknowledge me). Of the remaining companies, I noted at least a dozen who were not even pretending to accept resumes, and were just handing out business cards or promotional literature and telling people to go to the web site, before I lost count and just started flinging resumes at random and then scurrying off. But as annoying as these human billboards were, I can’t help thinking that the worst part of the fair was the inclusion of companies that no sane person would ever want to work for in the first place…

I’m not going to name any of them because, as previously noted, I’m not really into getting threatening letters in my mailbox (or threatening emails, but that’s another story), but at every job fair I’ve ever attended there have been a mixture of people who claim to be hiring people but actually aren’t. My favorites are the people who will only “hire” you for jobs in which you give them money. In my simplicity, I had believed that a job was a relationship in which a company gave YOU money for some kind of behavior they wanted to happen, but for a lot of companies, a job is when you give them money and in return they give you a bunch of merchandise that they claim you can sell for somewhat more money than you gave them in the first place…

These range from the ones who are mildly insulting your intelligence (you give them $600 and they will give you $750 worth of product, that after expenses, you can actually make $20 selling) to the ones who are completely insulting your intelligence (like the “Travel Agent” scam I’ve written about in the past, where you give them $900 and they give you an embossed card that says “Travel Agent” on it and claim that you can save more money on special secret deals that are only available to travel agents than the $900 you gave them upfront). And then there are the pyramid schemes…

Naturally, none of these companies think of themselves as Ponzi schemes; the industry term is “multi-level marketing organization” or MLM. And, in fairness, there’s more to most MLM schemes than just taking money from the new people and giving it to the established people on the levels above them; most of these firms also require the new people to sell things and give some (or most) of the proceeds to the established people on the levels above them. There are a bewildering array of these, selling everything from household cleaners to retirement plans, and they keep proliferating (despite the best efforts of the State and Federal authorities) because they are effectively making money off the stupid, the credulous, and the greedy, and there’s no way we will ever exhaust any of these abundant natural resources…

Almost as bad, though, are the financial companies that want you to sell insurance, stocks, or other intangibles for them. These sound more like actual jobs, in that they will provide training (sometimes even including your Series 6 and Series 7 broker’s licenses), office space, telephones, advertising and so on. Unfortunately, that’s all they will provide; the “jobs” are commission only, the company does not provide you with leads or even telephone numbers to cold-call, and if you do succeed in finding and selling your own customers, the company will still expect you to cough up the majority of the money you made. And if you fail you’ll have to leave and get a job that will actually pay you enough to live on; they won’t even have to fire you before they sell your desk to the next young hopeful…

I’m not putting down commission-only jobs, or the people who do them. I made my living that way for a number of years when I was younger, and even had fun on some of them, but over the years I’ve come to believe that those aren’t really jobs – and that the people who are recruiting for them should not be allowed to tell young, naïve and idealistic college graduates that they are…