Due Diligence or Buyer's Remorse

I spoke to a high end tech sales pro the other day. In the market again after joining a firm less than a year ago. Nice raise, rapidly growing young firm, great opportunity, etc, except, that it wasn't. Turns out the firm's website, marketing, PR etc were all baloney and they had practically no sales, no staff, and no future. (firm isn't an ROI client).

In a lot of cases today, there seems to be an ever-widening gap between firms' PR and marketing vs. reality. The whole field of advertising claims seems to have evolved mostly into an art in phraseology. While there are many legitimate quality companies around, it can be difficult to distinguish those from the pretenders.

Ford has advertised for years that the F-150 is the number one pickup in America. Turns out that Chevrolet Silverado/GMC Sierra actually has outsold the F-150 the whole time, but since it's under 2 different nameplates, they are considered separate trucks.

Mutual funds are notorius for touting fund value growth percentages based on some specific period of outstanding performance. Closer scrutiny often reveals that many had a short period of stellar growth which they extrapolate, but that they actually performed poorly overall.

Another interesting arena is the explosion in awards competitions. Anyone tried to keep track of the number of movie industry awards competitions these days? If you want a little positive PR, sponsor a new award competition and name yourself the winner. I'm thinking of nominating ROI Recruiting for the best IT recruiting firm in Pawleys Island with a staff of less than 10. Since the population here is only a few hundred people, I hope we win, or at least come in the top 3.

As a recruiter, I look primarily to the employees for the inside scoop on companies. Regardless of the claims of revenue growth, employee quality and experience, you can usually get the best intel by talking to the present and former employees. When the employees start voting with their feet, it's time to take a serious look at what's going on. A serious drain on talent not only impacts a company's revenue and performance directly, but also usually means the PR and Marketing effort and expense needs to accelerate to mitigate the growing negative buzz in the community. Recruiting expenses will often rise dramatically as the company loses great people faster than they can find them. You can fool the people for a while....

As a candidate, make sure you tap into the community at large when scoping out a new opportunity. Don't just read the website; talk to people who have worked for the company, or clients or vendors who have worked with them, to find out the real scoop. And make sure you find your own contacts to speak with, not just those the company refers to you. These are like candidate references; you have got to figure the candidate is going to provide references from those that he/she feels will put them in the most positive light. Companies are no different, so dig a little deeper. The time spent will be well worth it.