A Job or A Snow Job?

There is a big problem confronting job seekers today. Many of the advertisements in job sections do not actually lead to someone interested in hiring workers. A growing percentage of them lead to a "business opportunity". What is meant by the term business opportunity is a company that sells franchises or kits or access to information so that the gullible can supposedly make a six-digit salary by working 10 hours or less per week. There are many who will say that we should know that these offers are too good to be true. They are easy enough to figure out once you start to get the actual information. However, these companies are getting more and more secretive with the information one would need to find out that the job in the ad is actually a come on for multilevel marketing or an outright scam.

There are some certain signs that a business engages in ripping off people they are supposedly trying to "hire". Do they have an infomercial on TV constantly? Do they promise six-digit salaries or ridiculously low investments of time or effort? Does the person leading the program claim to have become a millionaire by using this "system" that they now wish to share with you, for a fee of course?

Of course, if we look at the cause and effect of these signs, these programs start to fall apart strictly on the basis of logic. Infomercials have to pay for air time, which is not cheap. Somebody has to be bringing in an awful lot of money to keep these programs on TV. Nobody is going to pay anyone over $100,000 per year for working part time at something they just learned how to do. It may work that way one time in five billion in Hollywood or Wall Street, but almost any millionaire you research will turn out to be somebody who worked long and hard to learn their craft and they continue to work long and hard at it. Furthermore, real millionaires who make their money through their knowledge and hard work don't need your money, and they aren't about to tell anyone outside their own organizations how they did it, either.

One company advertises constantly for people to sell their products. Claims are made of tremendous incomes and work schedules that should represent the maximum number of hours a person watches TV in a day, not the number of hours they work in a week. Along with the initial fees for signing up for their opportunity, you will need to pay them $39 per month for a website that is exactly like the website they provide to every one of their other salespeople.

There is a way to fix this problem. Newspapers and internet job boards could start posting the business opportunities separately from the actual jobs. The dividing line should be simple. Does a job seeker have to pay a fee of any kind to work at the position you are advertising? If so, then it is a business opportunity, not a job and the ad is for something you are trying to sell, not for a person you need to hire. Of course this would require integrity on the part of our nation's newspapers and the people who run internet job boards.

By the way, there is one procedure that is very effective in the internet age for sniffing out scams and rip offs masquerading as viable jobs. Simply put the name of the company into a Google search along with the term rip off or scam. You can usually gauge by the quality and quantity of hits that come up whether or not you would want to be associated with a particular company. This becomes somewhat more complicated when some these companies go to great lengths to mask their company names or to change their names when they stop getting enough people signing up. That makes it even easier in one way. Never sign up or even continue to talk about signing up with a company that won't even tell you their name. Is there no indication of the company name on the website they sent you to so you could get "more information"? If you're still on such a site after more than three minutes, you're late for the door.

Anyway, it's doubtful that these practices will change anytime soon. Companies such as these are responsible for a major portion of the advertising income for televisions stations and newspapers. It would probably require some sort of legislation to get these practices stopped but that would require legislators to pass laws curtailing advertising which brings income to media outlets they depend upon to get properly quoted and hopefully elected. Here we go requiring integrity of people again when there is money involved. If only the people who ran these ads would show some integrity, maybe we could answer ads in the job section with some hope of finding an actual job.