marketing companies [TEXT DELETED BY FORUM TEAM]

sp2301

Bear with me, it's long...this is most of an email I sent to various 'people'. Yeah I don't want to give away any details, pretty paranoid about this company!

"Dear ******,

First of all I'll say how embarrassed I am to be sending this at all - I think of myself as a smart person and was definitely caught in the wrong place mentally at the wrong time, and therefore was taken advantage of. However, I need more people to be aware of my experience so they do not make the same mistake. Also I apologise for the length, but I need to squeeze everything in!

My name is **** and I've just finished my first year at **** uni. Like most others, I'm constantly on the lookout for decent summer jobs and couldn't believe my luck a week ago when I got a call from a marketing company saying they were extremely impressed with my CV, and wanted to invite me in for an interview. I do an ******** degree and have no experience of marketing at all - however at the time I was too flattered to think about anything except how lucky I must be to have been picked out.

This email is not to threaten the company which wasted my money and time, nor is it a plea for legal action (I know these companies are 'legal') but I think a much higher degree of awareness is needed so that other desperate students don't fall into the same trap as me. The company who hired me are called Red5 Solutions, recently renamed from Parker Worldwide, and Powerhouse Ltd before that (it probably goes further back). They are a door-to-door sales company with exploitative motives, and a knack for misleading many young people.


The tip of the iceberg is the job advert itself. I will provide you with a few choice cuts...

<link to generic scam job ad>

It should be brought to your attention just how vague this job description is - "You will be working with customers and clients face-to-face" translates to (from direct experience) "You will be knocking on the doors of 'customers' who probably neither need nor want your product, for roughly 10 hours a day 6 days a week". Nevertheless, I somehow saw subconsciously past the numerous spelling mistakes and vague implications to convince myself this was a job worth pursuing.

<another link>

This time let me draw you to the indications of pay, which clearly states a SALARY (i.e. a fixed amount per month) of £18000-£20000 OTE. Obviously for me this seemed brilliant - £1500 a month coming my way over the summer? Great! Unfortunately they'd once again conveniently managed to miss off the fact this was a gross overestimate of the actual pay, which is 100%, every last drop, COMMISSION. In my week (during which I estimate I earned £25 but it's hard to say as I have had nothing) it was hard to tell if anybody in the office was earning even close to that amount due to the thoroughly dishonest atmosphere they'd cultivated, but I'll move on to that later.

Approximately 10 minutes after half-heartedly submitting an application for the job (at this point I believed it was way above me), I recieved a phone call telling me how amazing my CV was and that they'd love to have me in for a 'preliminary interview' the next day. Needless to say I was thrilled, and wasted no time in preparing myself by googling basic direct sales jargon. Obviously I also looked on Red5's website, but strangely this brought me no closer to actually understanding what the hell the job entailed (surprisingly enough no mention of commission-only, self employed door to door selling).

I turned up at the office, and was greeted by something which resembled a college common room complete with Kings of Leon at full volume, a pool table and fish tank. I was then invited in for an interview with one of their managers (probably a couple of years older than myself) who proceeded to finish off where the job ads had started, name-dropping clients such as Barclays and TalkTalk and waxing lyrical about the rapid expansion of the company. The reason, she said, why they interviewed so many people was that they were apparently a recession-proof business and were looking for many new managers to come up the ranks to open new offices in some far-off corner of the globe. In hindsight, I can now reasonably assume that they expect 95% of employees to quit within a month and so are in a constant battle to keep up the numbers. This drove the more senior managers to quite blatently mislead me into thinking the job was worth a lot more than it actually was, and that I was one of a 'lucky few' to be employed, as I will explain below.

The fact is, they were recruiting pretty much everyone. The reason for this was finally revealed to me when I was invited back for a second interview and observation day (OH how lucky I felt! They had told me they recieve around 60 CVs a day so I must be doing extremely well...right?). Again, looking back at this interview (read UNPAID TRAINING) day with hindsight it is easy to see the big red alarm bells, but at the time I was in a carefully thought-out grooming process with no chance of escape. I was whisked away to a town I'd never heard of (Portchester) STILL NOT HAVING BEEN TOLD this was a door-to-door sales job. The 'top account manager' I was assigned to for the day spent the whole time attempting to pretend I was part of a fast-track managerial training programme, in between knocking on doors attempting to sell people loft insulation. He set me banal tasks such as designing and marketing my own invention, which was obviously to keep my mind from asking any penetrating questions about the role. At lunch, he went over the 'outline of the business and progression' with me (meant to be the 'meaty' part of the day), scribbling on the back of a map obviously. I was too busy trying to impress him to notice the ridiculous nature of the job, and he was only too happy to keep quiet. I could have said pretty much anything about myself as long as I didn't try to probe the inner workings of the business, and he still would have wanted me.

The long and short of it is - surprise, surprise - after the third and final evening interview I was given the job, apparently based solely on my good reference from my performance that day. What I didn't know is that these were hardened salespeople who had SOLD ME A JOB, convincing me I had made it through a rigorous interview procedure where many had fallen, and had gained a job with real money and real prospects. I remember being ridiculously thankful for being given the opportunity. How many other people that week had been through exactly the same as me and were now awaiting the start of a new job? I gladly said I would quit my part-time work and could start on Monday (this was Thursday night). By the way, I haven't even got onto the bad stuff yet...

Red5 is similar to many, many other marketing companies in the UK. It operates a business model similar to that of a 'pyramid', recruiting everybody through the entry level positions with the promise of making it to management with mere months. This entry-level position consists of selling products or fundraising for charities on behalf of clients door-to-door. What they don't tell you in plain English until you've already wasted too much time is that it is completely commission based; i.e if you sell nothing, you get no money. Zero. The constant hallowed 'leadership' and management promotions make this bearable, but hardly anyone gets that far. It took me 5 days to work out that maybe 1 in 50 people employed actually stick it out long enough to become a leader/manager, and the rest leave within a month after effectively working FOR FREE - under the guise that until you can 'go solo' and have bought all the tools for the surveying, you can only ever earn half of whatever sales you make - and even then this is near impossible as the leaders you are out with will try to steal all of the sales you initiate. My £25 for roughly 50 hours' work will never see the light of day.

And then the cycle begins once again - a new horde of unsuspecting graduates/students/local young people will be lured in by the promise of managerial opportunites, only to leave after mere weeks when they realise they are actually LOSING MONEY rather than earning. You can see how the company actually doesn't need to pay out much at all, as hardly any stick around long enough to be making any meaningful money. Mislead people, exploit for a few days/a month or two, let them leave without bothering to pay them, recruit some more...

But, I hear you say,what about the minimum wage? Surely you can't work 6 days for them effectively as a slave? The way they skirt round this minor problem is by rushing every new recruit (they do this in groups of 7 or 8 due to the massive influx) through reams of contracts which disassociate Red5 in any way from us. In effect, we are self employed and in no way liable to recieve payment from them. This also gives us the privilege of having to pay all of our own transport, food and clothing - the manager told us we could 'claim that back' after a certain amount of months which again pulled the wool over our eyes. I have it on good authority (various internet forums) that anyone who asks for a copy of the contract to take home is quietly asked to leave the premises.

Another thing I forgot to mention are the frankly stupid hours - 11am till 9pm, 6 days a week. Yep, that's 60 hours...so even if you did earn the advertised entry level wage of £250 a week (which is impossible), in hourly terms you'd be on about £4.17. That's a joke, right?

The mood itself within the company is sickeningly positive, as if the 'leaders' are constantly having to convince themselves they are doing the right thing. This is probably a good time to outline the form of the business:

1. ENTRY LEVEL DISTRIBUTOR - this involves training and going 'solo' to make sales. During training you first have 3 or 4 days of 'retrain' where you are paid nothing at all, nor given the opportunity to do so. After this stage you become a 'lead gen' which consists of knocking doors in your own territory to make appointments, and then calling your leader to come and close the sales. Apparently you are meant to get half of whatever sales you generate, but I created at least 3 and recieved no mention of being paid...
Advertised earnings: £250-£350 per week. Realistic: £50-£150 if you work REALLY hard, and forget it in the first two weeks

2. LEADER - if you can hit set targets for a couple of weeks, you become promoted to leader. This means you can now start recruiting for your 'crew' of sales people, taking out road trips to other parts of the UK (paid for out of your own pocket) and apparently earning a lot of money. It was these leaders who really confused me, as they insisted and bragged about the amount they were earning but really weren't making that many sales - I'm led to believe it was a ploy. You see, it is in their interests for us lowly new starters to stick it out and make it to leadership under their wing, as this will mean they get promoted quicker. Basically, they were constantly persuading us not to leave, rather than us constantly proving why we should be there...I think you'll agree this is is not how a business should work.
Advertised earnings: £350-£550 per week. Realistic: probably half that, because it was still 100% commission ON TOP of having to constantly interview and take road trips at your own expense.

The positions above these are managerial and involve, from what I gathered, exaggerating your earnings whilst motivating all employees under you to go out and work (some FOR NOTHING) so that you could get a cut at the end of the day. Disgusting.


Anyway, I will leave you with some interesting forums where people have had similar experiences - it should make it clear to you just how immoral these companies are. All I wish to do is to make other students aware of the true nature of these businesses through my own experiences. If there is any way you could run a story on this in September I would love to hear from you and would have no problem telling you more. I have more where all that came from including some blatant lies told to interviewees and some stories from other employees (including one poor guy with a wife and child who worked for 2 weeks for NOTHING - twentieth century slave labour?). Thanks for your time in reading this, I hope it all makes sense!"

angelmooey

I would just like to thank you for this message. I have a interview today in a few hours with red five and am now glad that i will never ever go near this company, I had no idea this company had other been associated with powerhouse or parker before this site. I have had experience with Powerhouse and am ashamed to say they did exactly the same thing to me and I fell for it. At the time I had barely just turned 17 ,never had a proper job before, was extremely naive and completely broke. It even got to the point that whenever I mentioned money to them I was scared I would anger them.The working conditions were poor I was basically driven random city's such as reading or Bournemouth, made to stand outside shops with a crappy stall wearing a full suit in the middle of summer with no lunch breaks or no breaks full stop unless I told my leader I needed to use the toilet, bear in mind im working 12 hour days in suits in the sun on my feet all day with no breaks . To cut a long story short I worked 55 hours for a week and lost £10 in expenses and to this day feel completely taken advantage of and abused by this company . They target people who are desperate and vulnerable , steal your rare sales or if you do manage to make a few sales they lie about your commission.

sp2301

Yep it's horrible, you definitely did the right thing - they'll only change their name again and loads more will fall for it though...but if a few see this and decide to stay away from the !!!!!!!s my work is done

atulipsin

My son has just turned down a position with OMS marketing in Leeds, after a very quick and vague interview. Bells started ringing when he was told to come back the next day so he could 'see' what the company was about. When he rang to say he wouldnt be taking the position, they couldnt get off the phone quick enough. His CV was posted via My Leeds Jobs.

jackclowes

Thanks sp2301,

On my experience instead of kings of Leon blaring out it was foo fighters - insanely loud, with the hilarious profanities of Dave Groul "are you read to f***ing rock!" coming out of the big screen t.v. while I was desperately trying to fill in my attempted impressive information sheet for the interview.

Yes the interview room did look like a college rec room; during the interview I was assured that they don't just sit around and play pool all day....hmm! I'm thankful that I only attended the fleeting 3.5 min interview with someone who was half way between market stall fruit and veg man and full on crook!

So the job hunt continues.... Graduates beware! **Parker Worldwide, red5solutions- all the same thing, research your jobs folks**

volk5wag3n

Hey jackclowes and friends,

I got selected for a second interview at RedFive UK / Parkerworld, and then got offered the job position.

Apparently, the second interview or "Open Day" so they call it is a full 9-6 day training. Basically following all the other sales experts in a group drove off to quiet town/area and start walking in to shops. In the meantime, they want to get to know you better. Saw these people who successfully sold all the products and managed to earn approximately £300 to their own pocket a day.

It was explained that its a self-employed job, working hours 8 to 6:30 mon to fri, 9-6 on saturday, and they also mentioned that no tax is involved because however many products you sell is however much money you earn straight to your own pocket (cash).
A colleague also mentioned "only young people work here all between 21-28 only".

Now, by law, a few things are being breached here.
First, 9-6 full day training is a waste of time. Unless YOU are getting paid, they musn't do that. But they must, because it's their only way to show you this door to door job.

Second, because there is no tax involved you might get tempted to take the job. Every self employed must pay your own tax (in case you're a foreigner and you haven't noticed). On top of that, mon to sat 8 to 6.30 ??? Did you not say self-employed? Check out directgov mate, weekly maximum hour is 48 hours. That is just out of order.

Now, if you do your homework properly.
RedFiveUK or Solutions or Parkerworldwide or whatever bolox name they put is not registered in the Data Protection Public Register which is only £20/year....

Check yourself:
ico.gov.uk/ESDWebPages/search.asp

So they call it "Fast-track management business model" but standard business practice is not even met mate, that's an easy NO then isn't it?

This make perfect sense that there are so many branches, addresses, and owners. Also make perfect sense, that when s.h.i.t hits the fan, they could fcuked off from their rented offices, and then the authorities would start investigating you lot. Which also make perfect sense, that no one above 28yo would still be easy enough to fell for it. Not even sure how these managers would make money themselves, if the money is all going to your own pocket. System is abit dodgy or somehow not on the books.

I'm surprised this kind of job advert could still appear in a quite well-established online job website such as jobsite.co.uk.

Not to say, its not edible to do the job though, you could still make money out of customers but its not safe. Specially if you're not local as well.

And yes, they've only got foo fighters live in wembley dvd, cause they put it on everyday (first day & second day of my interview), but their receptionist is actually quite fit though!

erosanne

I nearly but not quite got sucked in by one of these schemes.
I had been applying for a number of jobs online, when I received an email (very quickly) in response to my submissions. It invited me to come for an interview the following day.
Straight away, my suspicions were aroused because they just seemed a little too keen (and my CV isn't that impressive). I decided not to reply immediately but I did check out their website which was very vague and really told me nothing. Within minutes, they rang, and the girl on the phone sounded very much like she was reading from a script. I know marketing techniques when I hear them, and was told that they had a high volume of applications, and only two interview slots left the following day, so it was very important that I confirm ASAP.
Despite being very cynical I went to the interview. I assumed it was just a marketing job that nobody really wanted (who does?), but since I am in need of work, and beggars can't be choosers, I thought it was worth finding out what the catch was.
It was immediately obvious that there were a lot of people there; Presumably, everyone who had sent their CV for various different jobs advertised on job sites (none of which actually exist). Indeed, there was loud music playing as we waited (not exactly professional), and I heard the girl who had rung me, giving the exact same speech to at least two other applicants over the phone (last day of interviews is always 'tomorrow,' it would seem).
In the mock interview, I was asked why I had decided to apply for a job in sales and marketing. Well, I didn't know I had! I'd applied for a specific job - nothing to do with sales and marketing - and was still vaguely hoping that job might exist.
I knew I would get through to the 'next stage.' Sure enough, the phone rang inviting me to attend a further day of interviews - on bank holiday Monday, no less! Wear smart clothes and sensible shoes (strange request). I assumed that the next stage of interviews would be some sort of corporate workshop, perhaps involving group role play or similar - hence the sensible shoes.
On Friday (I had attended an interview on Thursday and was asked to attend a further interview the following bank holiday Monday), I received an email asking why I had not turned up for my appointment that day. This made me even more suspicious because even if I had missed an appointment, most companies would just assume I wasn't interested, rather than following it up with a second chance and 'hard-sell.' I was told I had received the email in error, and was assured that Monday's appointment would go ahead as planned.
I was still highly suspicious so I googled the company and found little to nothing about them, other than hundreds of jobs advertised in their name. Then I googled their address, and found hundreds of references to this scam - amongst them this epic thread!
It seems this identical scam has been running for far too long, and I'm surprised that reputable job sites haven't wised up to these companies yet! I can't even be sure which job application led me to this company, but I will not be attending 'the next stage' of job interviews, which would almost certainly have been around 9 hours (I'd already been told it would be a long day) on a bank holiday, doing door to door sales for free!
I wanted a salary job, not a self-employed, commission based sales job (which was never mentioned to me at any point in the 'interview').
Despite being cynical and highly suspicious, I just thought it was a bit of a crappy job that nobody wanted. It never occurred - even to me - that it was a scam trying to suck people into doing door to door sales on a self-employed basis (in other words, for nothing).
I have to hand it to these guys. They're clever. There's nothing 'outside of the law,' and they don't exactly lie... they just don't tell the truth either, until you've invested (wasted) so much time in interviews that it feels like if you pull out you'll be losing out, and you need to get back what you're owed!
I was told the 'marketing job' involved 'face to face marketing.' Substitute 'door to door sales' and you might have a more accurate description, but they know that nobody in their right mind wants to do that!

The company (in its present incarnation) is called Fast Track Acquisitions, based in Sheffield.
Just yet another name to add to the long list of companies pulling off the same scam.
(Different name, different town, identical application procedure, and same old scam).

The moral of the story is to trust your gut instincts. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Companies like this prey on people who have nothing to lose. Despite my suspicions, I almost pressed on in the vague hope that there might actually be a genuine job with a genuine income at the end of jumping through all the hoops. I'm glad I did a little extra research and am so glad I haven't wasted any further time.

lee.tansley

A big thankyou to all who posted on this forum...i was a couple of hours away from an interview with red five after they had spent four weeks trying to get me to come in, i feel i have had a lucky escape...

purplehearts066

When looking for work, I found that the recruitment websites are flooded with these sort of adverts, and I did wonder what these 'jobs' involved.

It seemed highly suspicious to me because
1) They are constantly recruiting large numbers of people - recruiting staff is expensive - so this probably means they have high staff turnover and aren't paying their staff very much
2) 'On Target Earnings' seem suspiciously high, especially as:
3) They ask for very little (or nothing at all) in the way of qualifications and experience
4) Marketing is competitive - they quote job titles like 'marketing manager' but people I know who have good jobs in marketing are well qualified and have worked long and hard to get where they are
5) the adverts had a sensationalist 'get rich quick' feel about them. Unfortunately, very few people walk straight into highly paid jobs with no experience or qualifications.

If you work set hours every day for the same company, can't pick your own hours or refuse jobs -then you're not really self employed - but a legal loophole allows your boss to claim you are. Great for them - they get out of paying minimum wage, NI, holiday pay, redundancy pay, travelling expenses and maternity pay; they can drop you at a moment's notice and have no worries about being taken to an employment tribunal if they treat you badly. But not so good for you.
The Daily Mirror has been running a campaign about it (Gizza Proper Job - http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/investigations/tag/Gizza-Proper-Job/) and has actually featured the Cobra group.

realspecialone

Parker Worldwide, Powehouse direct and Red5 are all dodgy little crooks and they will sell you a pack of lies to your face and try to tell you how you can earn £30,000 + a year and then when you become a manager you will earn 60,000 + a year. Most of it is commission based and how much would you need to sell a day in order to make this amount. Imagine you average £30 a day and say you work 360 days a year with holidays of course which makes £10,800 and it is unlikely that you will be a able to sell the same amount a day lol

I went for interviews with them in the Regus building near Southampton Airport and they had uni graduates there and experienced professionals. They were all so gullible because the managers and staff didn't look like they earned 30k a year and they were all people in their early 20's. One of the managers was driving a battered old focus. They advertise vacancies on reed.com and totaljobs.com etc. and they sound convincing but look out for trainee, no experience needed in capital letters and their lazy grammar and spelling.

They sent you to do training with managers at service stations or shopping centres and try to get donations of helpless old people by pretending to be charities or selling fake makeup that is made by a fictional makeup artist in Hollywood.

I finally found out what they were about when I did a google search of parker worldwide and found forums of people being stuck in employment with these illegimate companies.

There was a topic on watchdog about similar companies in London in rental offices and how they make bold claims about working with TalkTalk, Sky and Vodafone etc.

Advice:

1: Trust your instincts.
2: Research companies on the internet before attending interviews and look at various forums.
3: Try to use logic and common sense and don't take what they say for face value.
4: Always suspect the worst if you are unsure.
5: Don't panic just go along with it until your safe.
6: Be skeptical if they always call you using mobile phone numbers instead of landlines, proves they don't have a permeant place of operations.
7: If they look at your CV and disregard your education/qualifications and go straight into what they want you to do.

Also I almost forgot, watch out for Proteus Europe in Winchester. They are a recruitment agency.