I have been on a months long job search trying to get a work from home job.
In early July, a company reached out to me about a '3 month contract with the potential for permanent placement' to work in Life and Health Insurance. I have just gotten my Life and Health license on my own dime, and this job offered hourly pay plus commission. They were going to start me in two weeks, which sounded great.
Then they did not start me in two weeks. They had the most ridiculous process I've ever seen(they requested my tax returns???), and even though I submitted all documents the same day they were requested, they pushed the start date back 2 weeks to early August. I was pretty upset about this, like a lot of people looking for work the start date is relevant to me. I'm trying to get a job because I need money to pay bills, asap.
By the time the new start date came around, they weren't even ready to start me anyway. They were supposed to mail equipment to me, and mailed it to my old address in a completely different state even though I contacted them via email from the beginning and told them I lived in a new state. Roughly a third of the other hires on the conference call hadn't received their equipment either. During the process, they directed me to use my old address on all the background forms, and said using my new address could somehow slow things down even further.
At this point in early August, they offered me options for two other contracts that would start at the end of August… another month away. The only thing was, these two contracts had different compensation offers… I was really confused why they would have different offers of compensation for the same job, so I started looking closer at their website; this is when I discovered they weren't in the business of selling insurance at all, they were in the business of selling “human capital.”
In over 40 emails and 10 phone calls, nobody every mentioned what they were really doing with that first 'job offer:' they were putting me through their system to be available to be sold as human capital cattle, they are a glorified staffing company. This was the reason they had me signing into multiple systems, and requesting the same information from me over, and over, and over. This was also the reason for the gaps in start dates, each time they were attempting to batch me with a new group of human cattle to be sold to the highest bidder completely different companies then the one tied to the original offer.
If this wasn't ridiculous enough, it seemed a lot like they had me doing all of the background check for them. They wanted me describe my background, then send out piles of documents confirming all these things. If I actually had a tarnished background, I easily could have just left those kind of documents out or edited them. It was wild.
This staffing company, Alight Solutions is a global sized parasite that expects to insert itself between employees and employers, without their knowledge, to cash in on other people's hard work. The one thing they should be offering as a staffing agency, putting people to work asap, is the one thing they apparently don't do. For the employers they are selling us to, they aren't even doing their own background checks, they are having the hired employees do them. I literally have absolutely no idea what value they were offering me when they reached out to me via phone and email to 'hire' me. It's bad enough the job hunting process is ridiculous, but now you have to watch out for parasites trying to insert themselves on your paycheck.
So now, it is mid August, I should have been working since mid July, and I'm completely broke, and it's kind of crummy timing, because I really need to take my cat to the vet. I wonder how these people lack so much common sense and heart.
Ask ALL the questions you can think of when you get contacted from companies offering jobs on the job websites, you literally never know what scam you're getting into next these days just trying to clock in and work.