Complaint Review: Marston Mills Inc. (reverse Recruiting Firm) - Chicago Illinois

This company is using the same tactics, but changed their name to Lightship Research Services.

This company is using the same tactics, but changed their name to Lightship Research Services.

This company is using the same tactics, but changed their name to Lightship Research Services.

This company is using the same tactics, but changed their name to Lightship Research Services.

I worked at Marston Mills a couple of years ago. I am surprised that they are still in business. Everything you said is correct. The reverse headhunting method is a huge rip-off. And I helped perpetuate it for three long months. In my defense, when Jim Johnston hired me, he did not tell me how he found his customers. He did not indicate to me how few resources he actually had to find companies. And I had just weathered a lay-off, had a grad school acceptance for the next fall, and needed a way to pay rent and health insurance bills. I had less than a year of job experience and degree in semiotics. My options were limited. So I took the job as a research associate. Jim Johnston is a born salesman. He will bulls**t you relentlessly. The guy's relationship to the truth is tenuous at best (for instance, the 9 to 5 job he sold me? Turned out to be more of an 8 to 9 job, weekends too.) I am not sure what Jim told you. But I can give you a rundown of the BS he fed clients. 1. First of all, Jim probably told you that he had a staff of 16 in the office. More like 4 or 5 overworked "managers". (The Marston Mills website lists several managers. Only Elizabeth Karkowski had actual managerial control.) 2. That rewritten resume was probably drafted by a kid fresh out of college with less than a year of substantial work experience. You're lucky if she had an English degree. 3. Actually, with the exception of Elizabeth Karkowski, none of Jim's staff had more than 2 years of real world work experience. I was the only one of my coworkers who had worked at another company before coming to Marston Mills. Yes, I know that the website claims that the staff all have something like "over four years of experience" in some field or another. What the website doesn't mention is that Jim counted our jobs held during college in this calculation. 4. You are dead on about the database full of useless information. Here is what we had to work with: Jim's amassed database of previously gathered information. Of this information, a good portion of it was out of date. Luckily, Jim required us to call each company on the list to get current information. Calling the general phone number for the company meant that we usually got gate keeper receptionists who refused to provide us with the name of the hiring manager or even the HR department. We were lucky if we could verify the address. If we needed additional companies, Jim had us use a crappy database called "True Advantage" that provided the level of information you could get from Yahoo Biz or the local phone book. And most of that information was wrong. 5. We were lucky if we got a day and a half to collect client lists (remember, this included having to call 100 companies.) Usually we had less than a day. 6. It took me a couple of weeks to figure out how Jim got his clients. Every time I asked Jim directly, he ignored me (he is conveniently deaf in one ear.) Basically, Jim would post a job ad on Monster.com or YahooJobs (not remembering which one it was) requiring an executive with something like 10 years of managerial experience. Someone like you would answer the ad. Then Jim would send an e-mail back to you saying something like "You weren't right for this job, but your resume is right for this special job finding service, call the following number." So you would call the number, get Elizabeth Karkowski who would then give you the canned sales speech (I had it memorized within days, the d**n speech never varied.) If you bought Elizabeth's pitch, she would then tell you that you sounded like you could benefit from Marston Mills' services, and she would schedule you an appointment with Jim Johnston. She would tell you that if your talk with Jim went well, Marston Mills would accept you into its program. Predictably, Jim would lead you on, tell you what you wanted to hear. He would misrepresent the company in the aforementioned ways. He would talk to you about your hobbies, your dreams. He would then say something along the lines of "I think we can help you." Having nailed the sale, he would take your credit card information, and send his staff to work. 7. Jim was a phenomenally s**+**y communicator. How did this effect the client? You might have told Jim A. Jim would tell his staff B. His staff would scurry around getting information for B (let us say that B= IT jobs in the hospitality industry in the Southwest.) We would send out B, only to have the client call back angry because he wanted to stay in the greater Houston area, and had no interest in working in the Hospitality industry. Jim would then scream at the poor researcher in charge of the account for somehow assuming that when Jim said B, he meant B and not A. I did a lot of clean up with the clients. A lot of apologizing, a lot of trying to get the actual information needed from clients. 8. Venture Capital was Jim's wet dream. I think he read about Venture Capital Firms being the next big wave in some business guru type book. In reality, Jim knew little about venture capital. He knew of virtually no venture capital firms outside of the large ones named in Forbes. Was utterly clueless to assist his staff in finding more venture capital firms. Didn't know of any publications or search engines (not that I had time to actually do careful research). He couldn't even describe the industry to me when I asked. 9. Jim did not even subscribe to Hoovers. Or Dunn and Bradsteet. I know Elizabeth named those databases in her pitch. She lied. Sorry. 10. You might have received an email from a Ben Gordon. Apparently Ben Gordon worked for Marston Mills around 2001 or so. He no longer does. Jim continues to use his name. 11. As for the American Marketing Association and the Research Roundtable, the one Jim claims his staff belongs to. The AMA is a real organization. I doubt anyone at Marston Mills belongs to it. I know I sure didn't. And I don't think that the Research Roundtable exists. 12. Jim did not lie about the educational credentials of his staff. We had all attended top Universities in the Chicago area. Jim prided himself in being surrounded by so many SMART people under the delusion if he just hired smart people, they would some how make magic happen despite a crappy business model and bad management. Jim got lucky with regards to the quality of his staff. The economy sucked, and we all had liberal arts type degrees, and thus without job experience had to settle for jobs at Marston Mills. Not sure if Jim actually graduate from Tufts. I wouldn't put it past him to lie about that. I was only with the company for three months, so I have no idea how well Jim's methods actually worked. I'm not surprised at your results. As great as reverse headhunting sounds on paper, Marston Mills is not the company to execute it. Jim Johnston invested too few resources in to finding the information clients needed. Not that Jim was running this as a sustainable business model. If you want your resume on the desk of the hiring manager of your dream company, you will need to network, and ask around. I honestly feel for you, just like I felt for everyone taken in by Jim's whole sales pitch. I could say something like "buyer beware" or "too bad, so sad." But I have been on the job hunt before, and I know how desperate things can get. I got taken in by Jim to an extent too. Those three months with Marston Mills were h**l for me. Jim and Elizabeth were both extremely unprofessional. They were very mean to their staff, making the job extremely unrewarding for me. Hope this answers some questions.