Not worth the money
Written: Jul 11, 2008
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| Full Review |
I have been a member of the Ladders now for 3 months. I paid for a 1 year subscription because given the economy I was not sure how long I might be searching. Here is what I have found:
The first thing I did was post my resume. I had the resume professionally constructed and I was very pleased with it. The Ladders has a resume review service for free, so I sent it along thinking they would recommend tweaks here and there.
I received back a letter stating things wrong with my resume that I did not have in there. They even referenced companies I have had no association. I wrote back and said "No thanks, but thanks for the form letter" and was then bombarded with "you have to have your resume rewritten" form letters.
The ladders charges $700 for rewriting a resume, so for them it is a potential major revenue stream.
So never having used their service (which is a rip-off by industry standards) I noticed they have a field that indicates how many times you resume has been viewed. I have many years of experience at several F-100 companies so you would think I would get a slow trickle even in a down market.
No Several months later and not a single person or company has viewed my resume. I have posted on monster recently (in the last month) and I have already received about 20 views.
For the uninitiated in job searching, what most of these boards do is return a list of resumes matching the entered keywords sorting by most recent activity. Like searching on the web, where the pages are displayed in a ranked fashion, most people don't make it past the second page.
It is my belief that The Ladders is also ranking their resumes based on whether you used their resume service or not. I did not so my rank is very low, even though I have recent activity. So if you are naive enough to use their resume service you would probably be viewed by an interested party.
The jobs are nothing more than jobs you can find anywhere else, monster, hotjobs etc except you have to be a paying member in order to access them.
That is when they have not expired, which you don't know until you click on them. It would appear they leave old postings up to increase the number of jobs they were able to dig up off of monster. This is not an uncommon practice in job boards, but I expected more from 100K+ job site.
When you do find an active job, most of the time you are directed to the company website where you have to reenter all your information again. Its not like other sites where you can just hit send my resume on file and attach a specific cover letter. No, you are basically starting all over again.
So in summary, I would say the ladders is not worth the money, bordering on a rip off. My resume has not ever been viewed and the jobs are nothing special. That is either due to the fact that no companies use the ladders or they are ranking you based on the ancillary services you buy. Either way, my opinion is to save your money and use the other sites available:
linkedin.com
monster.com
dice.com
hotjobs.com
careerbuilder.com
and for a pay site that I have heard good things about but have no experience with
execunet.com
I have heard is more like linkedin for high level executives with networking events etc.
Recommended:
No
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