By CAREEREALISM Founder, J.T. O'Donnell
9+ years ago, I made a decision to devote my career to changing the way Americans look at work. Along the way, I sometimes had the bandwidth to provide my career coaching services for free to people who couldn’t afford professional help.
But recently, things changed.
Now that CAREEREALISM.com has grown significantly, I have physically been unable to give away my career coaching. I get at least a dozen or so requests each day from job seekers asking me to work with them free. I wish I could help each one, but it would be counter-productive. Since my goal is to help as many people as possible, I have made a conscious decision to spend all my available time and energy on building up the one-to-many parts of this business (the blog, webinars, etc.), to ensure we can provide cutting-edge information and continue to help the masses.
Still, turning down job seekers in need really hurts! Like this...
Last week, I got the following e-mail in the Customer Service inbox:
Dear J.T.,
I would like to send my resume to you; I'd like to add you on my LinkedIn profile so you can see what I'm doing wrong. I've been laid off for a year and have had no luck finding a job. I've had a few interviews but no success. I'm always told I'm overqualified and interviewers fear I'll move onto greener pastures. I'll be the judge of that! HELP!
As I mentioned, I get lots of requests like this each day. So, I created a solution - a Career HMO that gives these folks the help they need. We launched CAREEREALISM Club in January 2010 so job seekers could get assistance from top career experts for next-to-nothing. There are already over 225 members. Here’s the story of one member who had been out of work 12+ months before finally finding us. He landed a new job after just 2 months of working with our private career coaching network! However, when I sent her a nice e-mail letting her know I wasn’t able to assist directly, but I had built a support resource she might be interested in, this is the exact response I got:As a single-parent watching my credit plummet faster than Wall Street’s credibility, it's infuriating. I'll continue browsing through your website. Thank you for the reply.
Ouch! I’m a Mom and that hurt. This response kept me up all night. How could I give these folks who can’t afford to sign up for our Career HMO the means to do so? Suddenly, it hit me. Corporate America: It’s time you sponsor job seekers in need! I’m looking for forward-thinking CEOs and entrepreneurs who want to help those in need of career support. With the average length of unemployment in America now topping 7+ months, this is a great investment. We can lower the unemployment rate and the costs that go with it! Any company that truly wants to support workers in America should take me up on this offer, right? What better way to show you want to help those in need of work? A great place to start would be all the companies that laid-off 1,000s of workers and didn’t give them any outplacement resources. Or, perhaps you know a socially-minded company that you think would be interested in getting involved with something like this? Either way, I’d love it if our readers would send me e-mails with the names of companies that should take part in this initiative. (Don’t worry, I won’t say who suggested them!) In return, we’ll let America know what a great company you are!- Any organization willing to buy 10+ subscriptions for people in need will get listed on EVERY page of our site as being advocates for the worker. With over 66,000 page views by readers each month, that’s a lot of positive PR!
- Those who buy 50+ or more will get an entire post written in their honor and sent out to the 1,000s of readers of this site, as well as top placement on the list.
