Anyone else gotten this?

[ebear]

I got a letter in the mail today informing me that I was "recently appointed as a biographical candidate into the "Cambridge Who's Who Among Executive and Professional Women in Nursing and Healthcare"...

What in the world is this all about? Anyone else seen this? I'm thinking it's a scam.

ebear

[queenjean]

It's not a scam, but it's not that you're being "honored" either. These publishers are sometimes called "vanity presses", meaning that they do these books for the sole purpose of selling them to the people who are IN them.

I honestly don't think it'd do diddly squat for a resume. It'd be hard to imagine anyone in the position of reading a resume not knowing that these "honors" are bestowed upon THOUSANDS of people each time, in an effort to get enough of them to respond to put together the book for which they'll pay for printing.

:yeahthat:

[plumrn, BSN, RN]

I got a similar one in the mail, but threw it in the trash. They know nothing about me or my career except that I received a certification- like thousands of others. How prestigious can that be?

Sounds like just a money-making idea someone thought up, that prays on our desire to be recognized?

Not that there's anything wrong with that if you have the extra money lying around.

[RN1989]

There are several corporations that do this that are not affiliated with certifying bodies. You can choose to participate or not and you do not have to buy the directory. They generally have certain criteria that they look for in nurses - if you have a certification or are involved in certain fields, management, etc. then they may be interested in you.

It can be used as both a networking tool as well as a resume picker upper. There are a lot of people who are impressed with stuff like that. If they weren't impressed with that kind of stuff we still wouldn't be playing the alphabet game behind our names.

Personally I have declined numerous invitations like this one because I prefer to keep my personal data like phone numbers a little more private. Many of these groups want you to put down a lot of identifying data on the card that they send you and then they want you to send it through the mail. I tried many years ago to put the card into an envelope and mail it so that the data would not be going through the postal system so openly like a postcard. The envelope was refused. Apparently it was too much trouble for them to open an envelope and their policy was to only accept the postcards.