Jobfox Resume Critique is a Scam, Part 2

About forever ago, when I still blogged and stuff, I wrote about the JobFox “Resume Critique Service” and how angry it made me. Basically this job search engine offers a free resume critique “service.” You check a box when you fill out a profile on their website, and a couple of days later you get an email from them which trashes your resume about as scornfully as possible, then offers to fix it for $400. It’s bad enough trying to make a sale by convincing someone they suck (don’t even get me started on the marketing of beauty products to women), but in the current context of high unemployment, foreclosures, global economic meltdown, etc, it’s particularly despicable. As I read this email designed to make me feel like crap about myself (an easy enough task lately, considering that the degree I earned at an insanely hard and extremely prestigious college has yielded exactly zero job offers in 10 months), I became more and more livid.

I decided the best way to extract my revenge would be to write a sarcastic reply, spoofing their email and providing a critique of their abilities as a con artist. I happily emailed it a couple of days after receiving my critique and several follow-up inquiries. I never heard from them again.

Now, you might ask, “But Laura, what good did it really do to write a mean and spiteful letter to these people?” That’s a very fair question. And the answer is quite simple.

It felt really, really, really good. =)

Enjoy.

(Note: For reference, you can see the full text of what was sent to me here.)

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Dear Madeline,

I’m the scam expert that was assigned to critique your attempt to swindle vulnerable unemployed job seekers out of hundreds of dollars. I reviewed your resume critique with the goal of giving you an honest, straightforward assessment of your recent critique, and not a judgment of your potential to make people curl into the fetal position and cry while opening their wallets for you. I should warn you about my style: I’m direct and to the point, so I hope you won’t be offended by my comments. (Instead, I hope you will become so despondent and depressed by the end of my criticism of you that you will jump at the chance to pay me an inordinate amount of money to help yourself feel better. But forget I said that.) My perspective is that a scam needs to be so complete that the marks forget that it is even a scam. In a perfect world, professional resume writers would be selected based on the precision of their computer-generated resume critiques. In reality, this isn’t how the process works. An unemployed person will know that you, Madeline, never actually laid eyes on his or her resume. So your cruel and unnecessarily harsh generic statements need to do the heavy lifting to make them so miserable and desperate that they forget it was all a lie anyway.

Here’s the good news: my first impression of you is that you are off to a good start in your scam. You’re an up and coming resume “expert”, with a lot of vitriol of offer. Now, here’s the bad news: your critique isn’t doing a good job using that effectively against your potential marks. I found it to be weak, only slightly biting, and unlikely to sufficiently destroy anyone’s spirit. If you were selling yourself as Dick Cheney, it’s as if your resume is saying “unpleasant politician.” Which one would be more likely to make you fearfully compliant?

Your scam email needs a boost from a visual, content, and organizational standpoint to engage the reader. Your target audience is people who are already downtrodden, dejected, and quite possibly even clinically depressed. But you need to really drive home your criticism, to make them feel even more hopeless than usual and convince them that you are a legitimate service that is actually interested in helping them. (As you know, these are no small tasks!)

Here are the major issues I see with your scam:

VISUAL PRESENTATION

Your design is very flat. The appearance is not polished, and doesn’t say Trustworthy Internet Service. By way of example, it’s like the difference between a professionally structured scam written by a highly organized network of tech-savvy Nigerian princes using the latest techniques in phishing, and a 13-year-old trying to convince her friends that they will fall in love at 10:22 PM tomorrow if they forward an email about a vanishing hitchhiker to 7 people in the next 7 minutes.

CONTENT

As I was reading your critique I was trying to imagine myself as a desperate and gullible unemployed person, looking for a way to spend $400 I don’t have. I then asked myself whether I would have been left feeling miserable and dejected enough to pick your service. I concluded that much of the criticism was lackluster and that in many instances it was not detailed enough to make your potential mark forget that your only goal with the critique was to sell them something.

There were some shining examples of truly cruel comments, but overall the wording was not impressive. Here are some examples of lackluster criticisms that don’t live up to the nastiness you demonstrated in other paragraphs.

* Lastly, I’m a little concerned that you won’t be found in resume databases.
* There were some disagreements in case and punctuation.

These statements are lacking in the forceful power to shatter the soul of an already dejected job seeker. It would be like you saying, “I am cruel to people,” when you could have said, “I am so mean, even Kanye West thinks I’m an asshole.” Which sounds more impressive?

ADDITIONAL ISSUES

I am concerned that your resume critiques will not get you noticed by potential marks. A well designed email scam includes keywords and phrasing that makes it easy for spam filtering to mistake it for a legitimate email, and hard for human readers to detect the overpowering amounts of bullshit at the core of the message.

NEXT STEPS

Most people aren’t like you – they make money through applying their skills honestly, without resorting to cruelly preying on vulnerable people who are facing the toughest job market in decades, possible foreclosure, the need to change fields in the middle of their careers, and who are wondering if $400 would be better spent to give them a “better” resume and a chance at a honest job, or feeding their children. Luckily for you, that’s where we come in.

Countless studies have proven that people who aren’t complete slimebuckets are happier in life, and if it shortens your miserable self-loathing by even one day, a professional soul-cleansing will pay for itself.

Purchasing the right redemption service is important. You want to be sure you are getting everything you need to move on from your disgraceful treatment of other human beings without being nickel and dimed. Money is tight for everyone but there is no price on being a good person. Countless studies have proven that people who aren’t complete slimebuckets are happier in life, and if it shortens your miserable self-loathing by even one day, a professional soul-cleansing will pay for itself.

The Deluxe Redemption package includes:

* A Professionally Written Apology to all of the people you’ve needlessly made feel miserable about themselves just so you could make a sale
* 3 day retreat in a natural setting to give you time to think about all of the people you’ve hurt
* Authentic-looking replacement mirror with an imprint of an artist’s representation of what you would look like as a decent human being, so you don’t have to look at yourself until you’re ready
* Sleeping pills, just in case the ability to sleep at night doesn’t return immediately

What’s the process once I purchase?

1. We will assign a spiritual leader to you who has experience redeeming souls in your industry.
2. We will send you a questionnaire that will get you thinking a little differently about your career and what you have to offer. It will help you discover potentially positive personal attributes you might have to offer society.
3. Once your apology has been sent to the countless people you trashed for your own personal benefit, you will be sent on a 3-day retreat with your spiritual counselor to discuss how you can go on living with yourself now that your eyes have been opened to how much of a total bottom-feeding scumbag you really are.

It was a pleasure reviewing your scam and providing you with this critique.

Please give me a call if you would like to discuss more details about our resume writing service. I’m here to help. You can reach me at 1-800-URA-DICK.

Best Regards,
Laura Nicholson
Decent Human Being Consultant

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