I agree it is encouraging to see Aquent following the Social Media and caring about what’s said. The challenge will be for them to actually follow through and make these changes to their operations.

Tanks for reading,
Chris

First let me commend you for your efforts to effectively monitor social media and it’s ability to impact your company.

As a marketer and consumer I have no problem with advertising in general. It effectively pays my wages, ( or will one day again soon when I find a new job.)

Assuming that you are successful in changing your corporate policy towards ads to clearly indicate to the recipient what they are for, then I would have no problem with them. In that case you will be advertising exactly what you are offering. Please be sure to notify me regarding your efforts to change company policy, I would be very happy to follow up this story with another blog post.

However, I still have a problem with these ads being listed with true offers of employment. I would assume that this type of ad violates the TOU, or it should.

There should be a separate place for them on job sites, or there should be a clear indication with colors or icons, that they are not offers of employment. But that is a matter for MediaBistro.

Thank you again for your response and please keep me informed of your efforts in the future.

Sincerely,
Chris

My name is Matt Grant and I work in Aquent’s corporate marketing department at our headquarters. I heard about your post here from our local office, as well as through Google alerts (where it had gotten “Dugg” by a friend of mine, Greg Verdino), and wanted to thank you for raising this issue. I do not think that we or any other firm should be posting ads for jobs that do not exist. (Although, as I understand it, the New Jersey office does have job openings that are similar to the one described in this particular posting.)

I went back and read the job posting in question and have to agree with you that it sounded more like a posting for a specific job than a “recruitment” posting. I contacted the New Jersey office and asked them to add the following header to that posting: “NOTE: This is a general recruitment posting that we are using to find people with the qualifications listed below. It does not refer to any specific job opening” – which they have done.

As a next step, I will be speaking with our VP of recruitment to make sure that we are addressing this at an operations level company-wide. I believe that any “recruitment” posting should be clearly identified as such. If it is not clearly identified, then I believe we open ourselves to the accusations of deception you are making here.

That being said, I don’t have a problem with recruitment ads in general. Since we are in the temporary staffing business, our clients call us because they assume that we have someone in our database who could help them out on fairly short notice.

We work hard to maintain a robust talent pool so that we can respond as quickly as possible to our clients’ needs. Frankly, we wouldn’t really be doing anything of value if we simply posted a job ad when we got a particular request from a client – after all, they could do that themselves, and in many cases already have.

I hope this addresses the concerns you voiced about our recruiting practices. If not, please contact me so that I can make sure that we are not frustrating or putting-off others in the future.

Sincerely,

Matt Grant

Steven, my question is why is your final sentence qualified by the “most recruiters”? Shouldn’t it be unequivocal? Every recruiter should know beyond a shadow of a doubt that fake ads are wrong.

As to Trula’s question, they collect resumes because they are a “contingency” rather than a “retained” search firm. Contingency firms are like commission-only sales people.

They find public job listings and throw a bunch of resumes at them, and if something sticks, they get a fee. So they need to have a steady stream of good looking resumes to throw at the clients.

Needless to say, posting fake ads to gather resumes is not considered an ethical practice by most recruiters.