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March 15, 2008

3 Reasons I’m Sorry I Joined Doostang . . .

ME Liz Strauss wrote this at 3:55 pm

Too Secret for Me

You must guess how hard I tried not to write this. I sat down, turned around, wrote several emails, found their blog and asked for help. . . . But I also think bad practice is bad practice and bad service is bad service. I don’t want any more of my friends asking their friends to get involved with a service that seems only to serve itself.

It all starts with an invitation that reads something like this . . .

I’ve requested to add you as a friend on Doostang, an invite-only career community started at Harvard, Stanford, and MIT. You can use Doostang to find a job or internship, network, and access valuable career information from peers and industry professionals.

Who wouldn’t be curious about something like that?

3 Reasons I’m Sorry I Joined Doostang

Harvard, Stanford, and MIT . . . pretty enticing. Some great things have some out of those schools. Some folks who have gotten nowhere have also started in exactly the same places. But most folks who go there are smart in some way — eh?

Inside Doostang are networking opportunities and job listings — some are open to all; many are open only to members of certain “professional groups.” There in lies the rub. To be considered for membership in one of those groups, a member must

  • complete a profile
  • enroll 20 new members in Doostang
  • AND request to join.

Note: The new member cannot see much more than the group’s name. There may be a slight description, but you’ll find no qualifications for membership, no viewable list of members, no sample of jobs that they’re hiding behind their membership.

The invitation above touts the core value they offer, but the rules are that you deliver your value to them before they deliver that core value to you — if they do.

Who’s serving who?

Reason 1 — Secret Meetings

I invited 20 of my friends who joined. Then I applied to four “professional” groups — two I cared about. I was rejected from all four of them. What appeared was single sentence that stated simply your application was rejected — no details were given. No sender is anonymous. The qualifications needed are stated nowhere. There was an invitation to contest it.

I went to the forum to check that out. There I found a thread which said that nearly everyone gets rejected from every group! The information came from a Doostang team member, stating that each group decides who will fit the qualifications of the jobs they offer. I visualized a secret meeting in a secret room. I would quote what I read and link to it, but I can’t (see reason three.)

Reason 2 — Secret Club

I took up the offer to reapply to two groups, pointing out my experience in the given areas. I was accepted. The jobs weren’t as exciting as one might expect.
Many of the job listings use that phrase “top-tier school” as a qualification. Guess that would exclude Truman Capote, Bill Gates, and Matt Mullenweg, all of whom left that path to make their own success.

Unfortunately, some highly qualified friends with deep educational credentials and visibly successful careers did not have the same reapplication success. My friends feel “taken” because they shared their high level contacts only to be treated this way.

Perhaps being rejected was more of an honor than getting in?

Reason 3 — Secret Locks on the Door

While there. I wrote roughly 3 emails asking to start a conversation about consulting possibilities regarding jobs that were offered. When I got no response from all three. I decided to sit back to watch how things worked. I watched for what seems a month.

About 4 weeks ago, I was greeted with this screen.

Doostang

I waited two days thinking it was a cookie or cache issue or software issue at their end. Nothing. Then I wrote to one of the founders, an address I had from helping a friend with an earlier issue.
I said . . .

Hi Mareza,
For two days now and no apparent reason, Doostang no longer recognizes me.
My user name and password don’t work and my email is not recognized.

I find this a serious problem. Can you help me resolve it?

Thanks!
Liz

After sending it a second time, I got this reply:

HI Liz,

Forwarded it along thanks. Not much more I can do from here.

Cheers,

I wrote a comment on this post at the Doostang blog on February 28th — it’s still in moderation. You can see it there.

Nothing’s changed.
___________
UPDATE: ONE THING HAS CHANGED. They took down the post on which I commented. Someone from Doostang also visited my Linked in profile. Still no one attempted to contact me about this manner.
__________

They have my contacts. I apologize to my friends to whom I sent invitations. I hope that your experience is better than mine.

Harvard, Standford, MIT . . . top tier on the Internet?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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31 Comments to “3 Reasons I’m Sorry I Joined Doostang . . .”

  1. March 16th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
    J. Erik Potter said

    If its any consolation, I’d forgotten I joined that site until you posted this. . .

  2. March 16th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
    ME Liz Strauss said

    Hi Erik!
    It’s easy to forget. :)

  3. March 19th, 2008 at 12:10 am
    jen knoedl said

    that SAME thing happened to me! i was invited, joined, invited my friends and then one day my log-in didn’t work!

    i sent an email, as you did, BUT i never even got a reponse. wow. how sad for them…

  4. April 4th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
    Kyle said

    The same thing has happened to me, and funny, it was right after I accidentally invited my whole gmail contact list. I also sent along an email to the help@doostang.com address, but having read this, I don’t expect much in return.

    Time to start sending apologies…

    Thanks for sharing your experience with them.

  5. April 4th, 2008 at 11:29 pm
    marie said

    the EXACT same thing happened to me. i thought, wow this is so great and interesting and then i realized, i was never going to get invited to one of the secret groups and then one day my log in stopped working and no one ever replied to my emails.

    i don’t even know if doostang is working for themselves if they start barring their contacts from the site. how can we post our lucrative jobs then?

  6. April 5th, 2008 at 9:38 am
    ME Liz Strauss said

    Hi Kyle and Marie,
    Thank you both for sharing your experience. I’d love it if more folks would do that. Your comments don’t surprise me.

    Within a day of this post, someone from Doostang had the time to check my LinkedIn profile, but not to correspond with me.

    Isn’t that interesting?

  7. May 14th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
    Terry said

    Thanks for the heads up on this! I just got invited to participate from a high level contact and found your blog on Google. I get tired of getting these types of requests, particularly when they are so self serving. You’ve saved me the trouble of checking it out further. After reading your post, I will not be joining Doostang (what a dumb name).

  8. May 20th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
    Dave said

    Thanks so much for the info, I got one of these invites and was considering putting a lot of effort into it.

    Keep up the good work, I’ll stay far away from this site.

    Dave

  9. May 21st, 2008 at 6:01 pm
    Tom Horgan said

    I received an invitation from someone I do not know to join and decided to google Doostang as I was intriqued by the reference to Harvard, Stanford, MIT.

    Thank you for posting this blog it helped me make a decision to delete the emailed invite.

    Tom

  10. May 21st, 2008 at 7:19 pm
    ME Liz Strauss said

    Terry, Dave, Tom,
    I’m glad that this helped. Three of my friends feel they were really burned and that they put their contacts up “for sale” to no real purpose.

  11. May 21st, 2008 at 7:41 pm
    Vijay said

    They are pathetic and real bunch of losers. It happened to me also. Doostang had its days before. Now its just for a bunch of wannabes and no useful talks happening there.

  12. May 22nd, 2008 at 9:38 am
    Ruth Marie Sylte said

    It seems that they are trying to work a specific niche. Their web site and their Facebook page say:

    ======

    NETWORK WITH THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST
    Our members are ambitious, talented, and well-connected. It’s no wonder that they prefer Doostang over other resources to help build meaningful professional connections.

    Who’s on Doostang?
    -Students and graduates of top U.S. universities and MBA programs
    -Ages 20-35
    -0 to 6 years of industry experience

    =====

    If the behavior reported by others above is true, Doostang begins to sound more like a clique.

    I wonder if there’s an apt comparison of Doostang to a “hot new club” — with plenty of people wanting admission, but only those acceptable to the “gatekeepers” are allowed past the velvet rope. The difference seems to be that those who want to stand in line (hoping to get in, but not knowing if they’ll be “chosen”) also have to “pay” upfront with their contact list for the privilege…

    Give me LinkedIn and XING any day. I’m not into clubbing. :)

  13. May 22nd, 2008 at 7:54 pm
    ME Liz Strauss said

    Hi Ruth!
    Thank you for this apt description. I still notice that no one from Doostang has managed to join this discussion, though I’ve noticed some lurking attendance. Hmmm. Wonder what that means?

    I’m with you. I’ll take LinkedIn and Xing any day.

  14. May 27th, 2008 at 8:32 pm
    Scott Page said

    THis is exactly what happend to me on Doostang! Never got an answer back, to why I was kicked off or let go, whatever.
    Liz Contact me please.

    Thanks,
    Scott Page
    scott@scottlpage.com

  15. June 3rd, 2008 at 1:35 pm
    Steven said

    Doostang brings spam to your email!

    The email address you sign up with is displayed on your profile and there is no option in the privacy settings to hide it. As I always do, I set up a unique email address to sign up for Doostang (as explained on BustSpammers.com). That email isn’t used anywhere else. I now receive spam to that address, today for example I was urged to “Stuff her with a mightier man meat, and give her all the joy and love.” Grrreat!

    Obviously, they have scrapers on their “exclusive” network who have nothing else to do but harvest member emails for spam.

  16. June 3rd, 2008 at 5:58 pm
    ME Liz Strauss said

    Hi Steven!
    Thanks for the information. It’s looking like Doostang doesn’t care much about their reputation. As of today, more than 9% of my search traffic hits this particular post.

  17. June 5th, 2008 at 11:23 am
    C. Lark said

    Is there any way for you, a newby to their group to start your own group on the site? If the tools are useful, it might be worth exploring , otherwise no way. LinkedIn is good, but is lacking in some tools to - like a way to invite contacts to a group event - Linked in members are resorting to using evites and the like to set up a sponsored regional group meeting.

    but thanks for this valuable post, and the corroboration form others. A client of mine just received an e-mail to join yesterday, and asked me to look into it. I will be wary in approaching it. Thanks especially to the note about SPAM, as he already gets too much.

  18. June 18th, 2008 at 10:52 am
    Keith said

    People, this is just a scam to create qualified email lists to sell to spammers !!

    Nothing more! Nothing less!

  19. June 18th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
    ME Liz Strauss said

    Hi Keith,
    They sure look to be that from where I sit.

  20. June 19th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
    Ann Wendell said

    A week or so ago I received my coveted invitation to join Doostang from the instructor of an AIRS class I had taken. I signed up using their handy “upload your LinkedIn profile” feature and shot off invitations to my LinkedIn network. I received an email back from from a twitter buddy @BarbaraKB saying I should check out your blog post and (stopping to bang my head against the wall) didn’t do that until today. While (in the interest of transparency) I filled out my profile with my personal/professional information I was most interested in accessing Doostang as an employer. Yesterday…for what seemed like endless tedious hours…I attempted to post about 15 jobs and…the horror began. Sidenote: about 25 of my friends (or as Doostang refers to them…suckers) had joined. Here are selected bits from my email correspondence (at least I can’t say that weren’t promptly responsive…in their own way.)

    Me - After spending a couple of hours posting jobs on Doostang (where every now and then the site would just decide to close half the jobs I just added so I would have to reopen each individually)I went to my profile and then tried to get back to the jobs I had posted. There appeared to be no record of the 16 jobs I’d posted and then I was bumped out of the site and kept getting an incorrect email/password message. I changed my password and while that seemed to take…when I did so it logged me out and then…wouldn’t let me back in, giving me the same error message!!

    Please help…this is extremely frustrating!!!

    Doostang - I have looked into this and it seems your account was blocked due to spam issues. Sometimes, when a user posts a very high number of jobs that are not relevant to our core demographic, the system tags the postings as spam and temporarily blocks the user. I have reactivated your account, but please keep in mind that we do not accept engineering/developer/programmer positions, and we ask that you review the job categories listed under “post jobs” to make sure your positions fit under at least one category.

    Me - Thanks for your prompt response and for ensuring that I had access to my account. I do see that all of the jobs I posted are now inactive. I’ll go ahead and reactivate them…again…and hope that the system will run smoothly.

    You asked that I keep in mind “we do not accept engineering/developer/programmer positions, and we ask that you review the job categories listed under “post jobs” to make sure your positions fit under at least one category.” Only one of the jobs I posted - a Senior Network Engineer - might possibly fall into the “engineering/developer/programmer” position type and nowhere in the information posted on the site (which I did of course read before posting) does it indicate that you do not accept that type of job. As to the categories I assume you are referring to the drop down list of Industries. All of our jobs fit into at least two categories - that of “Nonprofit, education, gov” as well as “Healthcare and biotech”. In addition I posted a job for an attorney for which I chose the category “Law” and a couple of Systems Anaylsts for which I chose “Technology”. I can see by your pie chart that almost half of your members fall under the Finance & Investment category…but it would follow then that over half do not and I see no explicit indication that the site is limited to those who fall into one particular category. This is, after all, 2008 and to believe that your members would not be interested in, and qualified for, careers in Healthcare and/or Technology seems a bit shortsighted.

    Me again - ARGGGGGGGGGGHHHH…so I reactivated all but two of the jobs deciding that the Network Engineer and the Cache Administrator were not spot on with your core demographic (although a quick look through the available jobs reveals a fair number of engineering and developer jobs in the 60 odd pages of the technology category as well as many in other categories as well) and now…another job has been mysteriously deactivated *AND* there are now multiple postings for a number of our positions.

    I would really like to be able to post jobs on Doostang. I certainly don’t want to redo posting the jobs - a process that was inordinately tedious. But…I certainly don’t want to leave things as they are as it now looks as if we’re the type of employer who can’t figure out how to get a job posted correctly. And while that is sadly true it is not due to lack of trying on our part.

    Doostang - Thanks for your message. We’re looking into the duplicate jobs issue.

    To respond to your previous email (and parts of this one), we allow developer/engineering positions within the financial services industry, as these are jobs that generally receive a large volume of replies. Anything beyond that likely slipped by, as we are a very small team and do not necessarily see every posting that goes up on the site. As for the other positions, you are welcome to keep them up. However, please note that even though these do fall under the “healthcare” category, a quick look through the other jobs in this section will give you an idea of the types of healthcare positions normally posted on Doostang. We are very sensitive towards maintaining a job board that is reflective of our users interests. The site is set up in such a way that whatever is posted most recently will appear at the top of the job board; going forward, I would therefore ask that you post your positions over a longer period of time (one position per day for 10 days, for example).

    Me - Thanks for getting on the duplicate postings issue. As to the rest…perhaps a few more tips for employers in the Hiring section as to what is and what isn’t appropriate (or what type of positions engender the most response) and specific instructions in how to get the best results with the posting system would not be amiss. I consider myself a reasonably savvy user of both job boards and social networks and this drove me to the brink…not that I had that far to go by this time in the week. Employers appreciate straight foward, easy to use systems and sites that clearly articulate their agendas. When I read “Doostang was created with one goal in mind: to successfully advance ambitious young professionals in their careers” I don’t think oh…except if those ambitious young professionals are software developers, or nurses, or systems analysts, or healthcare administrators. When you say “Hiring principals can post an unlimited number of jobs on Doostang” I don’t immediately think oh…but not in a way that’s actually convenient for me. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being exclusive…if that gets your constituency what it needs…but communicating that clearly saves all of us from wasting our time.

    Liz - do you have a copy of your apology letter I could borrow?

    Ann

  21. June 20th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
    GeekMommy said

    I don’t usually fall for this sort of thing… How I wish I’d read your post BEFORE signing in.

    It spammed ALL of my GMail & LinkedIn contacts - which I wasn’t aware of until suddenly I started getting asked about it last night.

    So I went to sign in TODAY and had the same experiences of “password doesn’t work” - changing password and it STILL doesn’t work.

    Argh.

    I don’t spam my friends - but several have already fallen for it. Fortunately, I used one of my secondary email addresses for it… but still…

    I wouldn’t have ever signed up except the invite came from an old friend on linked-in.

    We need to get the word out about these guys.

  22. June 21st, 2008 at 9:29 am
    ME Liz Strauss said

    Hi Ann,
    I hope you’ll pick up your comment here and make it into a blog post on your own blog. . . . Google needs more posts about what’s going on over there.

    Thank you for the confirmation of what we’re all thinking. I’ve sent you an email.

  23. June 21st, 2008 at 9:35 am
    ME Liz Strauss said

    Hi GeekMommy!
    I’ve been planning another post about this because of the comments here. I hope folks who have the same experience post about it too. It’s the best way we have of getting the word out to other folks.

  24. June 23rd, 2008 at 2:31 pm
    Ann Wendell said

    Hi Liz,

    I guess this is the push I need to get busy with a blog of my own ;-) I did tweet it and may retweet… Did you send me an email? if so…I didn’t get it…probably our overeager spam filter.

    I did get one last response from Doostang stating that the duplicate problem was fixed and “As for your other points, I very much appreciate the feedback, and you are right. At this time, certain policy matters are not stated as transparently as they should be, and currently, the website is not segmented in a way that encourages high volumes of postings over a short period of time. In response to this, we have just released a new job filter that should at least partially address this concern…”

    Not quite sure how a new job filter is going to help their elitist attitude or lack of response to the individual member.

  25. June 24th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
    Beth said

    Thank you all so much for the info. I received the invitation this morning to join. Before responding to the e-mail, I searched Google to see if “Doonsdang” even existed, or what folks have said about it.
    Your comments have helped me to decide to not bother with their e-mail
    THANKS!!!!!

  26. June 25th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
    Randy said

    THANK YOU!
    I search with Google BEFORE I responded to an invitation. And that is the end of that.
    Thanks,

  27. June 29th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
    Bloggy Question 84: Social Networking and Reputation — What Should Doostang Do? - Liz Strauss at Successful Blog - Thinking, writing, business ideas . . . You’re only a stranger once. said

    […] 3 Reasons I’m Sorry I Joined Doostang . . . […]

  28. June 29th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
    JoLynn Braley said

    I’ve never heard of this until now, sounds like an email harvesting kind of thing, eh? I’m sorry you got hooked into it Liz…off to read your update on this today…

  29. June 29th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
    ME Liz Strauss said

    Yeah, JoLynn,
    Ironically I was there because I was checking out such sites at the time.

  30. July 19th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
    Elizabeth said

    I was just getting ready to e-mail someone to ask them to invite me to join Doostang. I’m glad I did a google search and read this first. Thanks for writing this.

  31. August 12th, 2008 at 7:19 am
    Howard said

    “I wonder if there’s an apt comparison of Doostang to a “hot new club” — with plenty of people wanting admission, but only those acceptable to the “gatekeepers” are allowed past the velvet rope.”

    When faced with this dilemma, I think about Groucho Marx’s retort when faced with being barred from a club. Paraphrasing, I would never want to be a member of a club that would have me as a member. Why in the world would anyone need to join Doostang with so many other professional networking resources available?

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