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Have you ever seen the movie “Boiler Room” ? Its the story of a screwup who gets hired by an investment brokerage that sells penny stocks and other investments that are absolutely guaranteed to tank. Mostly they are sold to unsuspecting members of the public at large. The sales operation is a something to behold. A bunch of guys sitting in a large office space making a million phone calls with managers exhorting them to ever greater sales. The “stock of the day” is posted on a whiteboard for all to see.

Thats exactly the business model followed by three Los Angeles area recruiters, who are all owned by the same company on the East Coast.

Remington International Inc., The Boylston Group and Mac Arthur Associates are boiler room operations. Everybody sits around a large table and makes a ton of phone calls. Normally that would actually be a good thing in my book, however, these guys are all following a pattern established by the holding / parent company which starts with hysterical ads on various search engines. Yes there is even a whiteboard in front of all the sales people / recruiters. The worst part is the way representatives of the company develop leads. EVERY CANDIDATE IS PUMPED FOR INFORMATION IN EVERY PHONE CALL. And they are very aggressive about it. When a candidate signs up with them, he or she is asked to call in once or twice a week .When the person calls in the recruiter goes through a very aggressive game of 20 questions in order to see if the person has interviewed somewhere new. Talk about generating leads. Lets say you have an interview with a company that these guys aren’t aware of yet - do you think they would just sit still? No! They’ll send in their other candidates so you actually just created some competition for your own job search. Free enterprise ! Gotta love it. Anyways the entire operation reminded me so much of the movie “Boiler Room”. I have personally dealt with both Remington and Boylston and I have 2 friends who did the same. After a couple of weeks being grilled for leads during every call-in I decided to discontinue the relationship. One of my buddies actually got a placement with them and was fairly satisfied. Go figure. In my mind there are plenty of other recruiters who work on the principle of developing good long term relationships with their customers and candidates. TekSystems comes to mind, as well as Technical Connections and ItPros . Why am I writing about this? Well, since I’m hiring I am certainly not going to deal with boiler room operations like Remington, Boylston and MacArthur Associates.

If you happen to be an IT Manager and not a job searcher, get ready for some serious telemarketing by these companies.

One way they approach lead generation is by looking at proper job boards like Dice and Hotjobs to see if any companies have posted openings. Once a company has been identified, the telemarketers at Boylston for example will engage in something that could be called ” war-dialing” - to use a hacker term. Essentially these guys will dial into a company’s directory and just try any old name or department and name. The call will usually sound like this ” Hi Thomas this is Martha “. Notice the caller knows my name - from our phone directory no doubt. “I understand that you are an IT decision maker at your company”. At that point I asked “Who are you with Martha? ” She answered “I’m with a local Los Angeles company called Boylston Group”. I reply sounding semi-interested ” Aha, and who identified me as an IT decision maker?” The caller replies purposefully vague “I believe it was your receptionist.” The funny part here is that our receptionist was not at work when the call came in. To make a long story short, I simply told the lady that she had the wrong person and to dial back in through that receptionist to get the right one. End of story. Of course in a larger company this sort of “social engineering” approach to telemarketing might have resulted in more information for the caller.

The point I’m making is that this situation is not pleasant for the candidates looking for work nor for the companies that do have openings.

And finally, if you have time and don’t mind some really foul language, here is a place with 168 pages of comments. Its mostly former recruiters with Boylston / Remington etc cussing at former candidates and vice versa. What a mess!