Maybe I can convince Alan, our resident recruiter, to chime in on this, but I’m pretty sure that the rule is this:

If you have to pay for placement, it’s a ripoff.

“Job Search Firms: Big Pitches and Fees, Few Jobs“,New York Times, 2009 Aug 17.

I meant to post something more on this, but you should read it if you are using job search firms or thinking about it.

I don’t do job placement. I don’t even promise people with whom I work will get a better job. I can only promise that they will understand what will work and what will not. If I know some people who can use you, then, sure, I’m going to want to try and connect you with them. High potentials are hard for other people to find, so connecting you may help my reputation with these other people.

Which is always good.

Of course, many of you also have some wickedly weird coping mechanisms that we have to disable so that you can do the work at the level you are capable. It’s just a matter of giving you new techniques that work when you are working at the right level, and helping you identify the situations where those old techniques are still useful.

Don’t ever give money to anyone who says that they can get you work. It’s almost always a ripoff. Where it’s not, it’s usually just luck that you get the work.

Besides, most job placement people do not have any idea to help hidden high potentials find work in good times, much less when the economy is a mess and unemployment is still rising. Because being unemployed means that you will be more unemployed these days, you can’t do things they way that you have been doing them. Or the way that everyone else is doing them.

You probably can’t really look for a job. You have to meet people while seeming to be gainfully employed.

I’ll talk more about this later. It’s a trick that many of you can deploy.