Job Search Gone Wrong

I (Jeri) have been looking for a job for awhile now. Things in real estate have not been so prosperous for me and I think it's best for me to return to corporate America. So I found a Business Consultant job posted in Chicago. It was to help businesses turn things around and I thought that would be perfect for my background, skills, education and experience. The job had a lot of travel (leave on Sunday and return on Fridays), but Gerald and I thought it might be okay since it would only be for about a year.

The company name was International Profit Associates and at one time, it was #9 on Inc magazine's top 500 companies. I thought I couldn't go wrong. IPA sent me a case study that required me to complete a balance sheet, an income statement and a cash flow statement. I was pretty impressed with myself that I got them all done over the weekend. I submitted them to my IPA contact on Sunday. Monday morning he calls and tells me that I did great and offers me the job! Keep in mind this position is supposedly up to 85K and he just offered me the job sight unseen, no references and promptly sent an e-mail with my travel arrangements to start the job on August 7th.

I was on cloud 9 that I was getting my "dream job", but something was way too fishy (Thank you, Holy Spirit). After a little more research, I found all kinds of terrible web postings saying how terrible the company was (to those who posted). The types of things I read were:

• Lawsuits and customer complaints and unethical leadership
• The environment was filled with sexual harassment.
• Over 450 BBB complaints nationwide in the last 3 years.
• Overly aggressive sales and collection tactics
• Even Gerald has a friend who worked there for a short time who said it was terrible.

I'm so grateful I read these things before I went there. But I want to send a big thank you out to my Honey, who re-did my resume for me this weekend and it looks GOOD!!! Now maybe I can get a real job!!!