Harrison Careers

Copycats

Harrison Careers is unique and pretty successful at getting people hired. We respect competitors who have developed their own expertise and information to help their clients. However, we are very unhappy if anyone copycats our service by stealing our intellectual property, written handouts, and ideas. We heard about one such copycat who asked our clients for copies of our training material. This copycat even had the bad judgement to get in touch with us pretending to be a potential client so that he could receive confidential information about how we help people get hired. We take the following steps to protect ourselves from copycats:

1. We take steps to establish whether they are using our written information. It is pretty easy to establish this because we have many friends at universities who are happy to report who else is offering careers advice, and exactly what information they are distributing.
2. Once we successfully establish that our intellectual property is being stolen, we contact reference checking agencies. With the threat of terrorism, organised crime and money laundering, all multinational companies, investment banks, consulting, accounting, law firms, etc, use reference checking agencies to check the credentials of anyone they employ. It is likely that any copycats are at leading universities, and one day will be employed by a prestigious company. A negative report from a reference checking agency, using information about intellectual property theft supplied by us, will seriously damage the career of the copycat, and potentially make it impossible for them to work for a prestigious company.
3. Our legal advisor is a prestigious City law firm with an outstanding competition practice that thrives on protecting businesses from such copycats. We will not hesitate to instruct our lawyers to sue any copycats who we have established are or have stolen our intellectual property.

We are nice people who have worked hard to build a business which can change the lives of our clients by helping them get brilliant job offers. Our ideas are our own, and we write our own advice exclusively for our clients. We hate the idea of someone ruining years of hard work by stealing something that does not belong to them. We like and trust our clients implicitly, and know that they do not pass on information we give them to anyone else.

Hall of Shame

Giang Dang LSE 2008 BSc Accounting and Finance

Giang had been a client of ours since 2007. We worked hard with her during 2007, 2008 and 2009, where she had several interviews with Ernst & Young, Credit Suisse, Deloitte, Deutsche Bank, Lehman Brothers, and Citi. We prepared her for with lots of technical knowledge and coaching sessions for all these interviews.

In late 2009, Giang did not respond to any of our emails and when we tried to call her, the number seemed inactive. By spring 2010 it was clear she no longer wanted any contact with us.

We tracked her down – she is working at HSBC Vietnam in Corporate Banking. She figured easier to simply avoid us than pay the fees she owes us.

We still have not heard from Giang, despite our attempts to resolve the situation.

This section is dedicated to Summer Yuanyuan Huang who studied at London School of Economics and Graduated in 2006.

Summer joined our programme back in March 2007 and completed an MSc in Operational Research at London School of Economics later in 2007. She started at HSBC in October 2008 and we believe that she works in Futures Operations. We trained Summer for her interviews, provided technical knowledge, advised on various aspects of her job search and generally went out of our way to deliver the service we promised. Summer simply does not reply to our emails or phone calls – I guess she hoped that we would simply forget about her and disappear. Shame on you Summer!

Summer is an impressive woman who is going to be very successful. She is smart, and obviously worked very hard to get where she is now. Originally she studied accounting and finance at Leeds University. We do not understand why she would not want to pay us the fees that she contractually agreed to pay us. It is probably just an oversight, and hopefully she will get in touch and put things right.

Rui Raie Yu LSE 2006 MSc Risk

Rui had been a client of ours since early 2007. She was always very responsive to emails and we felt we had a really good working relationship with her.

During 2007 and 2008 Rui landed several interviews for leading investment banks and she received more than 38 one hour interview coaching sessions during this time. She was given more than 100 technical documents to study in preparation for all her interviews, and was given very extensive advice from Peter Harrison. In early 2008, Rui ended up receiving more than one offer from leading investment banks and had the luxury of choosing who she wanted to work for.

After she had begun work, communicating with Rui suddenly became really difficult as she would not respond to our emails and phone calls, until after more than a year of no contact with us, she did finally reply to us in November 2009. We spoke about the outstanding debt she had with us and unfortunately since then Rui has again broken contact with us.

It is hard to convey in a short paragraph how much time and effort was put in to helping Rui, but we really do feel we worked very hard to help her land an outstanding job offer from one of the top 5 investment banks in the world.