Complaint Rating:

Company information:
The Executive Professionals
8880 Rio San Diego Drive, Suite 375
San Diego, California
United States
Phone: 619-325-0899
www.tepteam.com

The company markets its products disingenuously and does not deliver the services it promises in its contract. It portrays itself as a complete end-to-end career services firm, but it's not. All it does is provide you with interviewing tips and a new resume. I was most interested in three services they offered: 1. Defining your career path (they gave me a Myers-Briggs test you can obtain for free off the Internet). 2. Assistance with salary negotiations (when I received an offer through my own efforts before I had engaged the program, my counselor told me it sounded pretty standard and there wasn’t anything he could do). 3. The marketing campaign. Their website states that they will “identify job opportunities” and “create a powerful marketing campaign” for you. This is simply a lie. They don’t identify job opportunities for you, and they refuse to do so if asked. And their marketing plan doesn’t exist. They gave me back the questionnaires they asked me to fill out and told me to go network. Does that sound like it’s worth thousands of dollars?

They will tell you to talk to everyone you can think of, but they completely remove themselves from that process. They will not help you to identify individuals you should be talking with, help you obtain the contact information for those individuals, or locate open positions. They also will not apply to open positions on your behalf. I already knew that networking was the best way to get a job. I didn't pay thousands of dollars to hear it from them. They purposely describe this "marketing plan" using ambiguous and vague terms so that the customer can’t realize how little value their services are.

Most ridiculous were their service levels. I was literally made to force my career adviser to do anything for me at all. After four months, my first career counselor told me that he was retiring. That was a lie – I found out later that he works for the Taylor Wingate Group across the street. My second counselor only stayed with the company for a month and then he left, too. The company never even bothered to tell me that he had left or to provide me with a new counselor. I was emailing someone that wasn’t even there! All the while, the time left on my contract grew shorter. My third counselor wouldn’t respond to my emails and requests for assistance. The only time he would communicate with me was after weeks had gone by and I had complained and sent reminder emails. When I confronted him, he deliberately lied to avoid responsibility by claiming that his emails must have gotten lost in the network or been re-routed into my bulk mail folder (they weren’t – I was checking). My third counselor also knew nothing about me and made no effort to become engaged in the process with me. He was completely unprepared for our meeting, not even knowing my work background or where I went to school (despite having my resume on paper). Then he asked ME to give THEM an electronic copy of my resume because they had lost it. Lastly, he promised to include my resume in their in-house placement service, which I found out later doesn’t exist either. What a disgrace.

My expectations regarding the marketing plan and my advisor’s would do for me were in line with how the program was sold to me. They were reasonable, but were not met. I already had good interviewing skills, so their service was a complete waste. I demanded a refund based on non-provision of services on my contract and was refused.