I applied for a management/marketing position with Florida Marketing Group via CareerBuilder recently. According to their want add they had managemt and marketing positions available were will training you if you had little experience. As a business student who has a passion for business, I decided to apply. The following day I received a call from this company to set an interview in which I did. While on the phone they explained what they do and that they work closely with some corporate accounts (Sherwin-Williams was mentioned). At the end of the phone conversation the HR recruiter stated that she would email me directions and refered me to their Facebook page to get more information regarding their company.
Before going to my interview I decided to do an extensive search on this company and found a lot of red flags that absolutely disturbed me. Here are the red flags:
Red Flag #1) Facebook page seemed fishy. There were very little response to their postings on their timeline.in edition there was no information or a picture of the leadership of the company. It did have their business address, phone number, and hours of operation.
Red Flag #2) I tried looking for their company website on a strong search engine like Google and had difficulty finding their company website. There was a same name company that had website but their business address was in Lake Mary. The website featured a bunch car audio companies nothing close to Sherwin-Williams at all. The webpage also looked unprofessional as well.
Red Flag #3) I also found out that this company shares the same office suite with a company (BreakThroughConsulting Group) that also tried to contact about a similar position. What this tells me is that they do not have enough office space to have clients meet with you at the office which means that this a door-to-door position. This is opposite of what was told to me. Also BTC Group's website had the same issue with their website appearance (Red Flag# 2).
Red Flag #4) The emails that were being sent to me were on a first name basis or they looked like this (Robert G.).
After noticing these red flags and being woken up from sound sleep with a deep gut feeling to not trust these companies, I decided to decline the interviews immediately.in this present day of the Information Age it imperative to have an strong online presense with a serious professional website appearance. These two companies displayed neither. I highly doubt that serious corporations do business with either company. Also neither company are BBB affiliated.
Suggestions:
*For Job Seekers who do receive an interview, do extensive research regarding company and use plenty of professional common sense.*
* Any doubt about the company at all, cancel interview immediately*
Also be wary of these companies in addition to the above mentioned. All these companies post aggresively on internet job boards like Craigslist, Careerbuilder, Indeed, EmployFlorida, LinkedIn.
The following companies are:
International PSI, Inc.
Ample Opportunity International, Inc.
EEA Inc.
Maitland City Marketing
BreakThroughConsulting Group (BTC)
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