Heads Up

Don D

Not really a question; just a heads-up. For those of you who place multiple recruitment ads in various media, there's a gimmick you may or may not have encountered. I've thrown away the last several bills so I can't cite the company for you; but, we periodically will receive what appear to be legitimate invoices/bills for employment ads that have run, AND THEY ARE BOGUS. Unless you have a very tight program in place to ensure you placed an ad prior to accounting paying the bill, this could happen to you. The 'bill' looks legitimate, has the business name of your company, the run-date and the precise job title and text of your ad. They actually copied your ad out of a paper, website or magazine where it DID run. The 'bill' is set up just as any real bill, with a column for the amount and payment terms with a discount for prompt payment. So, what's wrong with this picture?...in small print you are advised that this is not really a bill, but if you go ahead and pay it, your ad will appear somewhere. I suppose it's just legal enough not to be illegal.

Pork

Dandy Don with a 1004 postings, I am glad to read that you did not fall for that "ole trick" and that you have your sight well aimed at keeping those situations from happening. It is kinda like all the HR stuff that we receive for free only to be billed because you did not return thr trial "10" Bill Clinton" bust before the end of 30 day free trial period. Pork

Paul in Cannon Beach

Are you saying I may not already be the grand prize winner of $10,000,000 too?

Yeah, Don makes a good point. I also dislike the companies that try to pass them off as government agencies with names like "National So and So" and "The American Such and Such". They want you to purchase their postings and seem to always somehow know that your "current postings may not be compliant".

I also dislike the companies that send you invoices for newsletters asking you to renew when you never signed up in the first place.

Ok, I feel better. Thanks Don.

Cinderella

UGH! Will it ever end? xx( We've also had companies send us invoices for "national directory listings" (phone book type ads) that we've never placed. We have a company that calls at least once a month saying their "affliated" with Xerox :~~ and tries to send us toner for our copiers at "special frozen rates" because they "forgot to inform us the price was going up" when we've never even paid for toner before---> it's included in our maintenence agreement with Xerox! Another one of my pet peeves is websites that "steal" our postings from Monster.com. We get all kinds of resumes and cover letters stating the applicant heard about our opening from "so and so dot com" when we've never even HEARD of the site. The worst of it though is that these sites don't take down the stolen posting after we've taken it off of Monster so we have all of these people flooding us with resumes for closed positions. UGH!x:o
Cinderella

Steve McElfresh

My favorites are the folks who call, generally opening by congratulating the company on our substantial commitment to EEO, identify themselves as being from the "National Hispanic/Black/Women's Proessional Weekly" or such, and then announce either that:
- we have won an award for our continuing efforts on behalf of said group and will be honored in a forthcoming issue featuring our ad, and/or
- they want make sure our address is the same as last year for "our" yearly posting in their annual/special EEO edition.

I had a CEO who fell for one of these and came to proudly let me know he had taken care of it for me -- and was looking foward to the good PR that would result. He, of course, paid the (faxed) bill but never saw the promised "special edition." And he got at least a call a week for the next year with variants on this theme, trying to test how gullible he really was.

Warm regards,

Steve

Steve McElfresh, PhD
Principal
HR Futures

408.605.1870

Don D

You're exactly right about these supposedly EEO related groups, Steve. Trying to trick us into paying something like a yellow pages ad that never appears or a bogus invoice is one thing. STRONG ARM tactics is quite another, and, these guys are nothing but strong arm intimidators. Don't ever fall for their line. They can do nothing for you or your business or your EEO posture or anything else. All they can do is publish your company name in a 300 page small print book which is nothing more than a list of fools. Their 'come on' is always, "I'm Cynthia from the National Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity Center for Fairness and Diversity". Their success is based solely on how many among us are skittish and intimidated by the mention of EEO.

ritaanz

When I get a call like that, I just tell them that I don't do telephone solicitations. Please MAIL me your request. To date no one has taken the trouble. But your posting on this kind of stuff was a great idea. Have a geat day!

Lola815

Whenever I get a fishy phone call like that I always say that I am not authorized to make those kind of decisions and that they will have to talk to the owner (who is almost never in the office), I then put the call into her voice mail and I would say that more than 1/2 the time they don't even leave a message. It's a good way for me to handle it and the owner is not a fool, she's never fallen for anything before and she never returns calls for people she doesn't know.

Don D

Our CEO would wonder what he had me for if I bounced calls to his voice mail that I could have handled.

Lola815

The owner is my mom. It's more of a game than anything. She thinks it's funny.

Gillian

A few weeks ago a guy came into our office and informed us that he was checking our shredder as part of the maintenance agreement. We didn't give it a thought because when he took the crummy shredder away he left a really good one. Then he called and said it would cost $X to fix the old one or we could buy the one he left in the office. At that point we called the Purchasing Dept and found out that there was no maintenance agreement. We never called the scammer back and continued to use the better shredder until he finally got around to calling again, at which point we told him that we would give his shredder back as soon as he returned ours. Now we are back to using the old crummy one.

cindyp

It's nice to know I'm not alone in my frustration with these yo-yo's. These companies don't care if they get someone authorized or not. The one that took the cake for me was the long distance company that switched us over after speaking to a high school girl who was 16 years old. They didn't care that she was a casier in one of our Supermarkets and had absolutely no authority to switch. It took me three months and numerous phone calls to get it all straightened out. UGH!!

Marie

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 10-21-02 AT 04:16PM (CST)[/font][p]I get those calls wanting to verify the information from my last ad all the time. Usually it is the Black Equal Employment such and such. They can get really nasty. I tell them I don't have any record of ever advertising in their magazine and ask them to fax me a copy of what I authorized last year. Never hear from them until they call trying to pull the same scam months later.

Sunny

Just finished my yearly round with them. They call and say they are with the EEO Promotion Group or some such nonsense and they just want to verify our listing in their directory. I just tell them that we don't list with them and they go away. (Until next year.) I'm always tempted to go off on a diatribe about how much we are against EEO (and truth, motherhood and the American Way)But no one has much of a sense of humor any more.

jojo

We have also gotten the "phone call" thanking us for our support and wanting our renewal. They have even gone so far as to fax a "copy" of our ad to us (never the magazine). When we receive it there are legit ads from other companies with our ad in the middle. The ad is nothing but our company name in bold letters. The best one was sent to us from a "Hispanic magazine". The ads around ours were written in Spanish, but lo and behold ours was in English with the heading "Greetings to all our Spanish speaking friends". #-o