When you are seeking a change of job, it is only natural that you stick to 3-4 well-known and trusted employment sites. That way your chances of getting interview calls are maximized.
In general, registering on a job site can be a tedious affair and frustrating as well, on account of one or more of the following:
poor net connectivity at times, resulting in loss of progress as you type.
duplication of information, in the sense that you have to fill in all the required fields and then upload your resume too.
limitations caused by presence of drop-down lists in which you might not find the one applicable to you, like type of industry or role in the company.
bugs on the site.
The above are observations purely coming out of my own experience. It is quite possible that you might like to add some more.
Coming to the point, let me at the onset declare that till I started to receive emails from them, I had never ever heard of wisdomjobs. Getting hold of a person's contacts has become a piece of cake nowadays. This can be an extremely annoying prospect as you do not least perceive your inbox to be a public toilet.
So it all started from their side. The frequency of emails in the days that followed made me feel they were ten times more desperate than me to get me into another organisation. And almost on all occasions the subject line seemed to suggest that I had already bagged another job without my knowledge or intervention.
Not dissimilar to registering on employment websites, going through tons of email is a gargantuan exercise in monotony, not to speak of seafood stuff in the form of'phish' and'crap' served on irksome platters generously provided by spammers and scammers, surprisingly passed by Google as edible.
Whatever be the subject line, all emails from wisdomjobs were sent with just one intention, to seduce me into registering on their site. The prudent jobseeker in me had better options than that, having already been registered on half a dozen portals originating from India and the Middle East. But the more I ignored wisdomjobs, the more persistent they became.
Fortunately for me, there were no calls from their side. This abstinence was consistent till today, and if that guy had not called me, I would not have cared to type out this review.
Mention must be made of what wisdomjobs might have thought of as a brilliant piece of innovation - the Pragnya Meter. They would advise me thus:
'Recruiters seeking your skill rating
Post your profile with Pragnya Meter Score'
The emails that contained this advice also had ads by shaadi.com and Standard Chartered. So I put all of them together and arrived at the theory of obtaining a great Pragnya Meter Score, and eventually marrying( provided my wife did not object) and thereby going for a loan from Standard Chartered. They surely have innovative and brainy guys out there in wisdomjobs!
I did not break my head over this Pragnya business. Hence I am not in a position to comment on the same. However, in order to check if wisdomjobs were worth what they were describing themselves, I decided to register.
There was nothing special on their website. All I have to say is that the attempt to register led to some highly exasperating moments. I was never able to upload my photo. Even though the image was in jpg format, a message appeared as if to say that I was trying to upload something other than jpg, png, etc.
Wisdomjobs somehow decided that my current location was my preferred location. This was sheer madness. I intended to indicate more than 2-3 locations, depending on how many the site would allow.
Meanwhile, I got an email from them asking me to verify my email address by clicking on a link. I did that and continued with typing in all information about myself. I noticed that in spite of getting my email verified, the status on the site showed it as pending. Pretty soon I got another email, again asking me to verify my email address. I obliged. This went on six times until I decided that enough was enough.
I left my feedback against the said hassles and left the site, in a not-so-pleased frame of mind. A day later when I visited the site again, all that I was allowed to update was my choice of locations. In regard to the remaining issues, status quo was maintained.
Nothing was done by the wisdomjobs team to help me complete my profile. On the other hand, in a couple of days' time, they sent me an email asking me to update my profile to achieve completion. This was much more than what I could take, and without any hesitation, I unsubscribed from their mailing list.
Thereafter I concentrated on the alerts sent by sites like Naukri. Wisdomjobs went out of my mind till the call I made mention of earlier, came to my phone earlier today.
After introducing himself the person began to deliver a sweet, long and picturesque account of the immediate opportunities awaiting me. Though I interrupted him to ask about the employers and my position, he deftly worked around my queries and went on. Suddenly he negotiated a fictitious bend and told me something which, had he said prior to the commencement of his animated babbling, would have made me terminate the confabulation at once.
He must have been originally a blacksmith, one who was skilled in getting the iron red hot, shaping it and then quenching it in cold water. But it was not his day. All that he actually managed was to get some extra wisdom into me as he talked about the jobs that were on offer and for which I would have to make a payment, if I were to avail the services provided by wisdomjobs.
It was my turn to speak up without being interrupted. I told him in as few words as possible that I had never paid a single paisa to any employer, consultant or recruiting agent in my life in order to get a job, and my policy would remain undiluted and unaltered. Services like resume writing were different, and if a person was too diffident when it came to writing out his or her own resume, a specialist could be approached. But this was not the case.
The guy's energy drained off, and he politely ended the call. Some time later I had an email from his official address. It was about the amount payable based on a jobseeker's experience. Did he expect me to change my mind and pay up?
I am done with this party, that is all I know.
I happened to read many a review about wisdomjobs posted here. And that did not make for happy reading. How many innocent jobseekers would they have swindled so far?
