Archive for November, 2008

Are you on the resume treadmill – where you send out an endless stream of resumes and hardly anyone, if anyone at all, ever responds? It’s an unfortunate circumstance and sign of the times that while the internet has opened up a TREMENDOUS amount of possibilities and access to the world-wide job-scene, it has also opened the door to sub-standard, unprofessional, and frankly, rude “protocol” on the part of employers, employment agencies and job-posting-boards. A bad habit has become more and more prevalent. One where people are directed to send in resumes for jobs and then NEVER hear back from the posting board, employer or the recruitment agency. Before I came to CPGworks, I decided to switch careers and I tried that system. I submitted countless resumes for months through job finding mega-sites, through recruiting agencies and directly to companies who had posted ads for jobs that fit my skills. I heard from less than 1% of those people, and 99% of that 1% were automated responses. It was literally impossible to get hold of a live person by email or phone. Possibly another 2% that I did hear from were scams, marketing strategies designed to get me to buy into MLMs or pyramid schemes or “work-from-home-and-make-millions” schemes. These ads were made to “sound” like authentic jobs, but once you spent 15 minutes filling them out, you soon realized that you were caught in their vortex and it was a cover for another acitivity altogether. Oddly enough I went to one of these MLM meetings, and my “mentor” tried to sell me on paying in $500 as initiation fee and then I’d be making tons of money. It sounded too wierd, and the irony of it is that 4 months later, he contacted the very agency that I now work at, for a job. The MLM bubble had burst. Anyhow, it impacted me, and in fact, made me very irate to see that corporate America was treating people this way, so I decided to do something about it and applied to become a recruiter and was ACTUALLY contacted by a live person from CPGworks, and shortly thereafter, hired aboard. I’ve made it part of my mission to raise the bar on this industry, to make it possible for people to apply for a job and to be treated with decency and respect in return for responding to an employeers ad. At CPGworks, while we don’t claim to be perfect, and we don’t claim to bend steel in our bare hands or promise you the dream-job (although I have found such jobs for people in recent months), we usually try to respond to every resume that we get simply on the premise that we care enough to do it. We know what it feels like to be without work, or without a means to support yourself or your family. If you need work in the construction field, in the office support staff sector of the industry or in the property management zone, contact us. We’ll try to do our best to get you placed, but one thing for sure, we will also do our best to TALK TO YOU, so that you feel like someone “out-there” actually cares enough to let you know you’ve been heard.
Real.J. Laplaine – CPGworks Blog Editor