Background:
After 15+ years working abroad, I am now back home looking for senior positions. I was looking for services similar to the ladders.com in India and came across Headhonchos on one of my searches. I was thrilled by the fact that its parent company is ABC Consultants. Having worked with local vendors for my current company’s recruitment initiatives and understanding the know-hows of recruiters operate, I was indeed bought into Headhoncos’s claims on their services. Their biggest claim a) Access to unpublished priority jobs and b) Access to dedicated recruiters whose only job is to search jobs that match your profile.
It all seemed too good to be true, but because it was backed up by ABC Consultants, I did not do my due diligence. Most often, the branding and image blocks your rational thinking ability.
Current Reality:
Now I am platinum subscriber for the past two months. My expectation was that once your profile is updated and the recruiter is made aware of your interests, skills and target jobs, you can get back to your routine work, rest assured you will be taken care of. But, it was the opposite. Now, I have an added responsibility of reminding the recruiter and the support team that I am not getting what I paid for. The biggest joke is that they offered a resume critic service free of cost for the platinum membership fee of INR 9000. The fact is that just to avail this service, I had to call the support twice and send an email reminding them on this. Completely unorganized bunch of individuals.
More than the money, it is just the false claims and lack of response to your emails that is pissing me off so much. I have 5 jobs posted on the priority job section with ZERO% match to my skillsets. The only match I can see is the # yrs of experience and the job title. I am sure a simple search or a BOT program can do this. Why would I need a INR 9000 service for this?
You would think that the recruiter has some basic understanding on the technologies prior to sourcing jobs for you. I just found out that these so called recruiters at HeadHonchos are a bunch of freshers who can’t distinguish between basic DataWarehousing to Enterprise Architecture.
The worst part is that your emails and complaints are not getting the responses you would like. No escalation path that I know of. So, after paying the money, you are just left under the care of a single support team member and the so called recruiter.
It looks to me that someone in the parent company started off this wing of business without enough foresight and thought on how to achieve customer satisfaction and keep up with their claims on the website.
I do not see any advantage in being a paid customer, there is NO VALUE ADD to the platinum membership. I can do the searches on the website as a basic user and get the same results.
I hope someone at the top management is hearing and looking into these complaints and revisiting their strategy of dealing with customer woes. Currently, I see the company is in the mode of encouraging customer dissonance and not interested in a continued relationship with the customer which definitely will not only hurt the current business, but will tarnish the brand image of its parent company as well.
So, my recommendation is that if you are serious about job search, keep away from HeadHonchos. You will be better off spending the time in doing your own search and networking to get the job of your dreams.
I will keep this forum posted on whether there is any improvement to the service offered after this complaint has been made public.