Complaint Review: First Financial Merchant Services - Medina Minnesota

Company sent me an e-mail as follows:

We were looking through resumes on Monster and your resume caught our eye.
We have some positions that might be a great fit for you. For more information,
please visit our site at http://firstfinancialhr.com/find/4h142.html

Best Regards,
First Financial Merchant Services
Human Resources Department
805 Meander Ct
Medina, MN 55340

A bit more about us:

Accredited Member - Better Business Bureau Winner Best Places to Work 2008 (#1), 2009 (#3), 2010 (#2), and 2011 (#2) in the Minneapolis/St Paul Business Journal Minneapolis Regional Chamber of Commerce, Member Retail
Solutions Providers Association (RSPA), Member Merchant Services Provider
(MSP) registered through Wells Fargo Bank N.A., Walnut Grove, CA

First Financial donates to over five hundred fifteen (515) non-profit or charitable organizations annually through our GiveBack Program.

If you'd rather not get any emails from us let us know: http://firstfinancialhr.com/remove.php?j=11446&e=2818291
Thanks again

My information on Monster.com clearly indicates that I am an electromechanical engineer with a background supporting military functions such as shipboard weapons systems, avionics, submarine nuclear power systems, etc.  How could anyone in their right mind expect that a technical professional is a likely candidate to sell credit card billing systems to businesses?

As with any unsolicited e-mail for opportunities that sound too good to be true I immediately Googled the company and found information about the company and their tactics on ripoffreport.com, although it looks like they are trying to displace their numerous negative Google hits with information on their credentials, testimonials, etc.

What I found incredulous was the volume & content of the rebuttals to a single compliant filing about them from multiple individuals who all basically said the same thing - standard corporate rhetoric parroting their numerous psoitive internet claims, while at the same time denegrating the person who filed the complaint about his apparent difficulties understanding the English language in regard to their company policies & procedures among other things.

Sounds like many similar arguments I've heard in the past, most recently with scientologists, previously from other cult-like groups with completely self-serving agendas such as Sun-Yung Moon, ad etcetera.  Perhaps I should have said "ad nauseum" because rational, analytically-minded individuals can see through the rhetoric and easily see that there is actually little or no substance to these arguments other than their quantity and voracity.

Based on what I have seen on ripoffreport.com, greensheet.com, & similar sites all echo the same sentiment - an exploitive company trying to capitalize on a discouraging job market by trying to entice as many vunerable individuals into their scheme as possible in order to allow unsuspecting prospects to advance their self-serving financially-beneficial agendas into new markets for the least possible renumeration for the afore-mentioned unsuspecting prospects.

I have been recently receiving numerous calls from multiple individuals from insurance companies & the like based entirely on my monster.com resume, often times from multiple persons at the SAME company, which indicates a trend to solicit anyone looking for a job as a potential candidate to pitch their product to new markets (read: potential customers who may have dismissed them in the past who can benefit from the prospects creditability that a known/local/trusted individual may have with them for numerous reasons (think AMWAY without the possibility of ever going "direct").  Prospect does the work with vigor for a few months in the beginning, expecting to make continuing residuals for many months/years/forever, only to find that is not the case and they have basically sucked in local merchants they have frequented for years and perhaps even freinds & relatives only to be cut off from the fruits of their labors.

Sounds too much like my last job - once my employer had attained access to my former co-workers (mostly other design engineers), purchasing agents, & managers, they kicked me to the curb after riding the coat-tails of my creditability to gain access to these individuals they would otherwise never be able to approach.  Was I making so much that replacing me with 3 engineers was profitable?  Most likely not, but that's how dirtbags do business, and First Financial Merchant Services certainly sounds like the same dirtbags to me.

Sorry if this is a lot to digest in one sitting, but you may also consider this as your welcome to the "School of Hard Knocks 101", and hopefully you may be able to use this advise to avoid the pitfalls that lie in wait for the unprepared by companies like this.