I graduated quite early from college and then failed to land a job for something like 6+ months.
At the time, I had believed that the entire purpose of college was simply having that diploma that said I was qualified to work.
As it turns out, employers want workers with past experience. They are also willing to settle for graduation-bound students that have not yet graduated, because they can pay them low (or zero) wages in the form of an “internship”.
But if you have a degree and no experience, you’re out of luck.
I spent most of my time in college focusing on music instead of getting an internship. Like nearly all musicians, that got me nowhere professionally. Once I was out of college, I was in a tough spot. While all my friends who had had internships would soon (once graduated) get nice corporate jobs downtown, I got nothing.
I furiously pumped out resume after resume, hoping something would stick. It didn’t.
Then one day a man reached out, telling me he could get me a job. The way he explained it made it sound like he was interviewing me, like he was a recruiter for other companies.
I was too naïve to realize I was just a potential client to him.
But I was desperate and dumb, so I went with it. Before long, he had a couple of prospects lined up. One doing B2B sales with Ricoh, the printer company. The other was with Menards as a “Manager Trainee,” which he described as like an internship. He said I’d learn how to run a whole store, and then have my pick of any position after that, even potentially at corporate.
He pushed me hard to the Menards position and claimed that I would be a great fit there. I now realize that it was probably just the easiest one for him to place me in so he could get his payday.
I didn’t even understand how payment worked. The way he had originally explained things, it sounded like almost all positions had the same payment agreement, where a small portion of my paycheck would go to him for the first handful of months as long as I worked there.
That seemed reasonable.
I believe he touched on an alternate agreement which didn’t seem common, where you’d pay a large portion of your yearly salary up-front.
Of course, this turned out to be the latter.
In my first week of working, he questioned how I would be paying the $3000 I owed him, and I was totally blindsided.
After all, how could an unemployed kid fresh out of college and deep in debt possibly have $3000 on-hand?
I genuinely question how he can even make a living because he really didn’t make it clear that this is what would be happening until long after I was already working there.
I’m sure that was intentional. It would be hard to back out once you’ve already started working.
But how do most people pay him?
Obviously I didn’t have the money, and there’s no way a bank would have given me a loan. But I’m fortunate to have a strong family network, and I took out a loan from my brother to pay for it. A loan which I wouldn’t be able to fully pay off until just a couple years ago.
As it turns out, the job was not how he had described it. You basically are just being trained to manage a department in a Menards store, as the name implies. While he had said that you could just turn down offers to work at other stores as much as you wanted, that wasn’t quite true. If you turned down enough, you would lose your position.
And I should have exploited that, like he exploited me. He misrepresented the position. If I lost it prematurely due to his misrepresentation, I believe I would have been entitled to a refund.
Right before that happened, though, I got a job doing social media marketing at a small website design company, and the rest is history.
Obviously I learned a lot from all of this, namely that I never, ever want to work retail. And to understand the fee structure of any service.
But I only recently had the thought: what if I would have gone with the Ricoh position?
Since it’s a sales job that’s likely mostly commission, I imagine it is much less of a sure-thing than the Menards job. He probably wouldn’t be compensated nearly as highly, which is why he pushed me away from it.
And I had a bad taste in my mouth from a sales job I did in high school, so I wasn’t exactly eager to get back into doing that.
But ultimately, developing sales skills and working B2B would have been much more closely aligned with what I do now. It also would have enabled me to really work with a variety of different industries.
All else being equal, I think it would have been a much better opportunity for me. Whereas Menards is pretty much a dead-end for every single person that works there and doesn’t carry the name “Menard”, Ricoh probably would have had plenty of opportunities for advancement within the company, and even elsewhere.
So to that “job placement” guy: you should be ashamed. Preying on desperate college grads. Misrepresenting yourself and your services, pushing them towards your most profitable option, and then locking them into paying you without explaining how it works is a pretty shameful way to operate a “business”.
The only silver lining is that I accidentally forgot completely about our first meeting and completely blew you off. The fact that you still wanted to meet with me should have been a red flag.