OmniPartners/CareerBridge job placement and resume preparation services are an absolute ripoff that anyone lucky enough to learn about beforehand from someone not connected to the company will have much to be thankful for if they can avoid any dealings with the company.
I signed up for this service after they touted themselves as having helped thousands of other individuals find positions in a variety of industries including my own, which is Information Technology. I have worked in this industry steadily for 20 years, but after leaving my last permanent position in 2014 and tiring quickly of job leads from the likes of LinkedIn that were flooded with hundreds of applicants, I was assured that the unique approach of CareerBridge would get me in front of the people I didn't even know I needed to be in front of and finding positions in the hidden job market of unadvertised positions at top companies.
CareerBridge's method for doing this involved the following, as broken down by several of their reps in several conversations before I signed up :
Targeted cover letters custom designed for each company sent to with the hidden contacts I really needed to reach to access this hidden job market.
A professionally designed, committee agreed upon, targeted and impactful resume that would stand out and get my career highlights and experience understood.
A committee led deep dive into this hidden job market that would uncover the companies offering positions that would be of interest to me, in the geographical locations I expressed interest in.
A professional, highly effective, and insightful web portal from which I could further educate myself with all sorts of advise and insight on how to reach the people I needed to and how to "nail the interview" with them.
A virtual guarantee that such targeted efforts would bear fruit.
For this I was asked for a bit over $600 upfront with a balance of another $1700-$1800 due to start being paid in six months. So this was down paid for in April of 2015 with first payments due in October of 2015.
I had a couple of long phone conversations with so called career counselors who made a great show of telling me pretty much the most generic information there is about getting a job and more or less rewording and repeating back to be conclusions they'd reached from what I already had told them about what I wanted to do.
When I logged onto their website, I was greeted by a very poorly formatted and functioning form site that appears to have been built off of a $50 template DVD. I have been designing high functional websites for 15 years and I tell you I have never worked at a company that would have allowed such a poor site to get out of DEV, not to mention getting to staging or production. As far as the content available on the site? It was the type of thing one would find on literally any job portal as an amateur article post. LinkedIn is littered with this sort of advice. Some of the links led to functionality that had no discernable purpose at all, and what did have a purpose was simply done badly. I had grave doubts about the overall confidentiality of my online account as well because of the overall quality of the site and the absolutely Romper Room level password I was given to log in. I don't even recall getting an SSL indicator on login, though I might have simply forgotten it.
Once on the website, there were a series of seemingly endless forms to fill out that were supposed to customize other areas of the site and process for my specific application. Again - poor form design leading to a very dubious experience and no confidence whatsoever that this information was actually being used for anything or even that the form posted to anything substantial.
While on the site, one could access these purportedly custom lists of companies involved in the targeted mailing. First of all there were entirely too many companies listed to beleive that any serious vetting had occurred in the time it took to compile the list. Second, this list needed to be pared down to 40 companies, which means that I am now doing the job I had paid them to do. Worse, despite my having named at least four different geographical areas in which I was interested, including my home city of Los Angeles and its surrounds, easily 3/4 of the list they put up was located in the Tri-State area of the East Coast, and included more than just a few companies that only existed on the East Coast, such as the Long Island Railroad and Port Authority, which would likely mean paying for travel to interview and would definitely mean having to move across country. I had to reject that list and commission a replacement that included my local area.
The letters that were supposed to go to these contacts as customized for the companies in question showed up in a box. When I opened it, I got what can only be described as a stack of form letters with a similarly worded paragraph at the top that mentioned some publicly accessible news story or company happening, with what was quite obviously a simple address merge. The letter was highly generic and did nothing to link me to its wording, as the same things could have been written about anybody. The accompanying envelopes came with no postage, meaning that I as an unemployed person with no source of income would have needed to shell out nearly $75 more dollars in postage to get these letters where they were going.
Onto the resume. I had to send the resume I created to them first which they used along with what they must have gotten from those online forms to write their "professional hard hitting resume". What they put on the website was essentially the same busy, book of a resume I had sent them, with font changes (to Times New Roman which everyone HATES), smaller font, and some rudimentary placement changes. I have been sending this resume out and have updated my job board profiles with it since mid May and I have had no less than 20 different recruiters, several company reps, and one former colleague tell me I should PAY to get a professional resume done. When I tell them I paid for the resume they were looking at they just blinked, or else told me it was too long, too hard to drill down into, not keyword-aware, would never make it past any online gateway, and would likely get tossed by any HR or hiring manager who saw it because it just didn't get to the point fast enough.
I got fewer of those comments on the resume I wrote than that, and I hadn't changed my style in 10 years.
Needless to say, I didn't even bother to send out those form letters. I didn't have the money for one, and for another, I had no real reason to beleive anyone being contacted would just open a cold form letter and reach out for dialogue rather than tossing the letter because they didn't have an opening, or weren't the proper party, or had a company mandate to send applicants through an online ATS. I certainly did not want to risk my reputation with any of the companies I might have tried to contact later with such a phoned in first effort. Now I get calls daily from the finance company this outfit uses wanting their money, and upon outlining what I have all they want to tell me is "you signed the contract". This is the same sort of thing that used to put scam modeling companies such as John Robert Powers out of business back in the 80's, and I know this because my parents sued them for trying it.
I won't be paying them a dime, and this letter is the beginning of what I fully intend to become a lawsuit should they persist in bothering me.
Thank you for your review. It was very useful to me and helped me make the decision NOT to go with that company. I received two phone calls from them and they listed all the services you mentioned. I recognized a very generic memorized sales speech when the person was describing their approach and services. When I asked for specific numbers regarding their success rate or the time frame regarding the whole process from beginning to getting a job, they were unable to provide me with anything but very generic information that did not really answer the questions. Again, thank you for your review as you basically saved me from paying $2200.
I've had several calls with CareerBridge. They delivered a rote sales pitch and asked that I pay by PayPal. I declined; they seem a complete fraud designed only to bilk job seekers out of precious and needed cash.
I worked with Career Bridge this year, and had great success with their service. I had been on the market for 3 1/2 months with no success. I started working with Career Bridge and had interviews very quickly. I accepted an offer within 30 days of beginning their program. I had 2 offers in my hand and both were a great fit. They also helped me to negotiate between the two and I cam away with a very nice package. I am forever grateful to them for their help. I am so glad that I reached out to them for a consultation. When will people learn they can't believe everything they read on the internet. There are a lot of websites out there designed to destroy businesses, and you all buy into it! As an executive I know the impact that people's skepticism and false claims can have on a business. I wish you all good luck out there.....
Career Bridge has contacted me and wanted to talk again to apparently give
me their sales pitch. However after reading the comments here, it would appear that I would be throwing away precious severance pay on almost nothing of value.
Sad how people try to take advantage of people who area already out of work and vunerable
Much thanks for the review which revealed much of what I suspected about Career Bridge. To prey upon people in their most vulnerable state is not only disgusting and ethically dubious, but should be a confidence crime. I hope others read of your experience and take it as a warning.
Career Bridge Reviews
OmniPartners/CareerBridge job placement and resume preparation services are an absolute ripoff that anyone lucky enough to learn about beforehand from someone not connected to the company will have much to be thankful for if they can avoid any dealings with the company.
I signed up for this service after they touted themselves as having helped thousands of other individuals find positions in a variety of industries including my own, which is Information Technology. I have worked in this industry steadily for 20 years, but after leaving my last permanent position in 2014 and tiring quickly of job leads from the likes of LinkedIn that were flooded with hundreds of applicants, I was assured that the unique approach of CareerBridge would get me in front of the people I didn't even know I needed to be in front of and finding positions in the hidden job market of unadvertised positions at top companies.
CareerBridge's method for doing this involved the following, as broken down by several of their reps in several conversations before I signed up :
Targeted cover letters custom designed for each company sent to with the hidden contacts I really needed to reach to access this hidden job market.
A professionally designed, committee agreed upon, targeted and impactful resume that would stand out and get my career highlights and experience understood.
A committee led deep dive into this hidden job market that would uncover the companies offering positions that would be of interest to me, in the geographical locations I expressed interest in.
A professional, highly effective, and insightful web portal from which I could further educate myself with all sorts of advise and insight on how to reach the people I needed to and how to "nail the interview" with them.
A virtual guarantee that such targeted efforts would bear fruit.
For this I was asked for a bit over $600 upfront with a balance of another $1700-$1800 due to start being paid in six months. So this was down paid for in April of 2015 with first payments due in October of 2015.
I had a couple of long phone conversations with so called career counselors who made a great show of telling me pretty much the most generic information there is about getting a job and more or less rewording and repeating back to be conclusions they'd reached from what I already had told them about what I wanted to do.
When I logged onto their website, I was greeted by a very poorly formatted and functioning form site that appears to have been built off of a $50 template DVD. I have been designing high functional websites for 15 years and I tell you I have never worked at a company that would have allowed such a poor site to get out of DEV, not to mention getting to staging or production. As far as the content available on the site? It was the type of thing one would find on literally any job portal as an amateur article post. LinkedIn is littered with this sort of advice. Some of the links led to functionality that had no discernable purpose at all, and what did have a purpose was simply done badly. I had grave doubts about the overall confidentiality of my online account as well because of the overall quality of the site and the absolutely Romper Room level password I was given to log in. I don't even recall getting an SSL indicator on login, though I might have simply forgotten it.
Once on the website, there were a series of seemingly endless forms to fill out that were supposed to customize other areas of the site and process for my specific application. Again - poor form design leading to a very dubious experience and no confidence whatsoever that this information was actually being used for anything or even that the form posted to anything substantial.
While on the site, one could access these purportedly custom lists of companies involved in the targeted mailing. First of all there were entirely too many companies listed to beleive that any serious vetting had occurred in the time it took to compile the list. Second, this list needed to be pared down to 40 companies, which means that I am now doing the job I had paid them to do. Worse, despite my having named at least four different geographical areas in which I was interested, including my home city of Los Angeles and its surrounds, easily 3/4 of the list they put up was located in the Tri-State area of the East Coast, and included more than just a few companies that only existed on the East Coast, such as the Long Island Railroad and Port Authority, which would likely mean paying for travel to interview and would definitely mean having to move across country. I had to reject that list and commission a replacement that included my local area.
The letters that were supposed to go to these contacts as customized for the companies in question showed up in a box. When I opened it, I got what can only be described as a stack of form letters with a similarly worded paragraph at the top that mentioned some publicly accessible news story or company happening, with what was quite obviously a simple address merge. The letter was highly generic and did nothing to link me to its wording, as the same things could have been written about anybody. The accompanying envelopes came with no postage, meaning that I as an unemployed person with no source of income would have needed to shell out nearly $75 more dollars in postage to get these letters where they were going.
Onto the resume. I had to send the resume I created to them first which they used along with what they must have gotten from those online forms to write their "professional hard hitting resume". What they put on the website was essentially the same busy, book of a resume I had sent them, with font changes (to Times New Roman which everyone HATES), smaller font, and some rudimentary placement changes. I have been sending this resume out and have updated my job board profiles with it since mid May and I have had no less than 20 different recruiters, several company reps, and one former colleague tell me I should PAY to get a professional resume done. When I tell them I paid for the resume they were looking at they just blinked, or else told me it was too long, too hard to drill down into, not keyword-aware, would never make it past any online gateway, and would likely get tossed by any HR or hiring manager who saw it because it just didn't get to the point fast enough.
I got fewer of those comments on the resume I wrote than that, and I hadn't changed my style in 10 years.
Needless to say, I didn't even bother to send out those form letters. I didn't have the money for one, and for another, I had no real reason to beleive anyone being contacted would just open a cold form letter and reach out for dialogue rather than tossing the letter because they didn't have an opening, or weren't the proper party, or had a company mandate to send applicants through an online ATS. I certainly did not want to risk my reputation with any of the companies I might have tried to contact later with such a phoned in first effort. Now I get calls daily from the finance company this outfit uses wanting their money, and upon outlining what I have all they want to tell me is "you signed the contract". This is the same sort of thing that used to put scam modeling companies such as John Robert Powers out of business back in the 80's, and I know this because my parents sued them for trying it.
I won't be paying them a dime, and this letter is the beginning of what I fully intend to become a lawsuit should they persist in bothering me.
Beware of fake statitics
How long it takes on average for applicants to get an offer has to be discounted against how many applicants actually get offers.
Very Useful review
Thank you for your review. It was very useful to me and helped me make the decision NOT to go with that company. I received two phone calls from them and they listed all the services you mentioned. I recognized a very generic memorized sales speech when the person was describing their approach and services. When I asked for specific numbers regarding their success rate or the time frame regarding the whole process from beginning to getting a job, they were unable to provide me with anything but very generic information that did not really answer the questions. Again, thank you for your review as you basically saved me from paying $2200.
I agree
I've had several calls with CareerBridge. They delivered a rote sales pitch and asked that I pay by PayPal. I declined; they seem a complete fraud designed only to bilk job seekers out of precious and needed cash.
They are not a scam
I worked with Career Bridge this year, and had great success with their service. I had been on the market for 3 1/2 months with no success. I started working with Career Bridge and had interviews very quickly. I accepted an offer within 30 days of beginning their program. I had 2 offers in my hand and both were a great fit. They also helped me to negotiate between the two and I cam away with a very nice package. I am forever grateful to them for their help. I am so glad that I reached out to them for a consultation. When will people learn they can't believe everything they read on the internet. There are a lot of websites out there designed to destroy businesses, and you all buy into it! As an executive I know the impact that people's skepticism and false claims can have on a business. I wish you all good luck out there.....
Very Useful as a warning of what a scam looks like
Believe it or not this positive review was very useful as a warning of what a scam looks like.
I know what a good review looks like and this has issues.
Glad I checked out this sight
Career Bridge has contacted me and wanted to talk again to apparently give
me their sales pitch. However after reading the comments here, it would appear that I would be throwing away precious severance pay on almost nothing of value.
Sad how people try to take advantage of people who area already out of work and vunerable
Thanks for the Warning
Much thanks for the review which revealed much of what I suspected about Career Bridge. To prey upon people in their most vulnerable state is not only disgusting and ethically dubious, but should be a confidence crime. I hope others read of your experience and take it as a warning.