I was an idiot for using "The Ladders".

In the past I have recommended the Ladders web site as a place for highly paid professionals to search for high paying job postings and get inside access to top recruiters. However, my experience today led me to question my recommendation. I contacted the Ladders about my frustration in being able to contact recruiters directly — they don’t allow it — or find out which company had posted the job. The support person brushed me off so I did some research.

I found out the the Ladders lost a class action law-suit in 2013. The suit claims that:

“From its inception until September, 2011, TheLadders scammed its customers into paying for its job board service by misrepresenting itself to be ‘a premium job site for only $100k+ jobs, and only $100k+ talent.’ In fact, TheLadders sold access to purported ‘$100k+’ job listings that (1) did not exist, (2) did not pay $100k+, and/or (3) were not authorized to be posted on TheLadders by the employers.”

The I did some Google foo using the keyword “The Ladders Review” and found mostly negative reviews.

I apologize to anyone who has used The Ladders based on my recommendation. I should have know better. I should have known something was wrong when I paid for a résumé critique and rewrite and then two years later, when TheLadders offered a free critique of that same unchanged resumed, a different the reviewer wrote that my résumé needed a lot of work.

The Court ruled that the plaintiff “has sufficiently pleaded a claim that the defendant breached the June 2010 Terms of Use.” The Court also ruled that facts pleaded by the plaintiffs “give rise to a plausible inference that the allegedly deceptive transaction occurred in New York,” and that the plaintiffs have standing to assert claims under the law.Ask The Headhunter® | Nick Corcodilos

I have cancelled my Premium membership and will use LinkedIn's free job search tools.

Author: Khürt Williams

A human who works in information security and enjoys photography, Formula 1 and craft ale.

2 thoughts on “I was an idiot for using "The Ladders".”

  1. As a former employee I can assure you this is just one of the many questionable things they are doing. The real reason that you can't contact recruiters directly is that the recruiter most likely never posted the job on the site. A significant amount of jobs posted on theladders.com are manually scraped from a company's careers page without the company's knowledge. Ladders doesn't even know what the positions pay! They just guess based on "market research".

  2. the truth will set you free.. congrats on eating humble pie.
    rung it up

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