Terrible Experience with Marston Mills, Inc., Career Research Service
Marston Mills, Inc., is a Chicago-based employment research company that offers to do? Reverse searches? On behalf of candidates seeking new employment. A traditional recruiter or headhunter firm will contact an employer about openings. When the traditional recruiter learns of an opening, he or she will send that employer the resumes of various candidates. If the employer ultimately hires one of the candidates submitted by the recruiter, then the recruiter gets paid a commission, which is typically one-third of the new employee's salary.
In contrast to the traditional recruiter's approach to employment, Marston Mills offers to conduct research on employers for their clients, who pay Marston Mills $990 each for this service. Quoting now from Marston Mills own advertisement on the Internet: After we determine your career objective, industry and geographical preferences, we will review your resume, cover letter, and other written documents that you are using for your job search to design the most compelling and effective presentation possible.
We will then generate a list of one hundred (100) appropriate target companies, the parameters of which will be defined by your career objective, industry and geographical preferences. The researcher assigned to your search will then call each target company and ascertain precisely the person to whom you would report. You will have direct access to the researcher working on your behalf, as well as the entire project team throughout the process.
We will provide the names of these contacts along with their work addresses, phone numbers, fax numbers and/or e-mail addresses. Estimated delivery time is ten (10) business days. If you do not meet your employment objective with the first 100 targets/contacts, we will continue to generate more targets/contacts for you until you do. Although 85% of our clients meet their career objectives within the first 100 targets, we guarantee to provide this continued service to all our clients at no additional expense.?
All of that sounds wonderful, but unfortunately the reality of the service I received from Marston Mills was far below that ideal. Marston Mills was supposed to provide me with the names of the direct hiring managers for the job title that I had discussed with Marston Mills's principal, Jim Johnston. Marston Mills was supposed to send detailed contact information including that person's direct phone number and e-mail address. Marston Mills was supposed to call up each firm individually *after* I contracted with them and obtain that information on my behalf. We all know that sending a resume or application to the? Human Resources? Department is often the kiss of death for that application.
Instead of being sent a list of 100 qualified leads, I was apparently sent a dump out of Marston Mills' database of generally available information on firms. Yet Marston Mills' principal Jim Johnston claimed Marston Mills had contacted various private equity firms on my behalf to locate the hiring manager for a position as? Team Leader, Mergers and Acquisitions.? Among the 100 names Marston Mills sent me were (1) Thomas Lauer, Advent International Corporation; (2) Bob Locklear, Agave Capital; (3) Leon Black, Apollo Management; (4) Tony Ressler, Ares Management LLC; and (5) Kate Mitchell, BA Venture Partners.
Instead of being sent information directly pertaining to Thomas Lauer, Marston Mills sent me the company address, company phone number, and company fax number all of which was publicly available (for free) at the following Internet URL: http://biz. Yahoo.com/ic/43/43418.html. It turns out none of the information on any of the contacts was directly for those contacts; instead, Marston Mills sent me (often publicly available) information on Bob Locklear's company that matched exactly the data on http://biz. Yahoo.com/ic/108/108632.html, on Leon Black's company from http://biz. Yahoo.com/ic/40/40036.html, on Tony Ressler's company from
http://biz. Yahoo.com/ic/132/132593.html, and on Kate Mitchell's company from
http://biz. Yahoo.com/ic/108/108853.html. Even the names of these contacts are all fully disclosed on the biz. Yahoo industry web pages. None of these people turned out to be hiring managers for the position I had discussed with Marston Mills. For others on the list of 100, sometimes the contact name did not match the people identified on biz. Yahoo.com for a particular firm, but then the address and phone numbers and fax numbers appeared to be directly from biz. Yahoo.com or some other industry database.
I contacted Marston Mills, Inc. To ask whether the company had tried to pass off publicly available information as its own proprietary product, and Jim Johnston assured me that it was merely a coincidence. Marston Mills did not merely give me a dump from the biz. Yahoo directories? Information that I was clever enough to find on my own before I even contacted Marston Mills.
It turns out that the sales pitch used to induce me to do business with Marston Mills was fraudulent, and the Marston Mills approach to finding work yielded a ZERO positive response rate in my opinion. Although Marston Mills re-wrote my resume, something I do periodically on my own with better editing skills than Marston Mills displayed, and prepared a hokey cover letter in small print sent out on 6.25 inch by 4.5 inch cut paper, the Marston Mills methodology of mass mailing unsolicited resumes had an entirely predictable result: a ZERO positive response rate following Marston Mills, Inc.'s guidelines to the letter. I feel deceived and cheated by the Marston Mills service. I do NOT recommend this company to any person, whether or not that person is intelligent enough to research employer names on financial databases like Hoover's or biz. Yahoo.com.
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