BEWARE!?How to avoid JOB SCAMS

It’s difficult to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without any bread. Your contact information is much like the bread in the peanut butter and jelly sandwich; without putting your information out there, is highly unlikely and increasingly difficult to get a new job offer. There are many different companies who offer ID Theft protection (Zander ID Protection, Lifelock, ID Shield) and most of them are very affordable (from $5 to $20 a month depending on coverage needs). These plans are primarily to protect your credit and your bank account, so how can you protect your resume?

There is currently no real solution to be able to job search while protecting your resume without paying for it. If you use Monster, CareerBuilder, Indeed, or LinkedIn, they are currently too overwhelmed to offer protection to anyone who is not paying for their services. There are nefarious people who are willing to pay a fee and can then set up a “recruiting” website and download your contact information. This fortunately does not give them access to your bank accounts. What they do next is send you emails, commonly known as phishing; with fake job offers, they request “account verification” on accounts you may or may not have, and can offer free or low cost goods and services. So how can you tell?

Step 1 – Match the emails

I get job offers frequently to jobs I didn’t even know I applied to, as well as invitations to interview for jobs I am interested in. One of the first tasks for me is to make sure the emails match up.  This is one of the easiest ways to identify a phishing scam. You get a letter from a well known company about a role you would be a fit for, and the person’s contact information at the bottom of the email does not match the account who sent you the email. I always alert my email provider about these emails and identify them as phishing scams.

Step 2 – Do your own due diligence

Assuming the emails match, the next step is to research the company before you respond. If you think the job opportunity is too good to be true, it often is. If you get an email or message offering twice the income of what the typical pay for the role is, do some research on the industry. I recommend typing the name of the company and the word SCAM into the search engine of your choice (Google, Bing, Yahoo) and see what comes up. Most large companies know scammers are constantly offering job opportunities on their behalf and will let you know through their site what an offer from them would actually look like. Additional research can be done simply by seeing if the company has an opening for the role on their website. There are several provisions to this (see sub points below).

Provision 1 – Executive level roles are not typically disclosed through a company website

Provision 2 – Some roles are too new to be on the company website.

Provision 3 – Some roles are only filled through recruiting firms.

Step 3 – Were hiring as an inexpensive way to promote/advertise our business

This last step is not necessarily a scam but it does cause a great deal of frustration to job seekers. There are companies who offer job opportunities as a means of promoting or advertising their businesses. Perhaps the business is well intentioned and may mean to fill the role in the near future, but they don’t really bother to set up any interviews. The most common ones I’ve seen were hiring for sales/business development personnel. Every company needs someone in a form of a sales role but often can’t afford to hire the sales person they need, so they advertise/promote their business by using placement ads as an inexpensive form of advertisement.

If you found this article helpful please LIKE and SHARE, I appreciate your help. There are other scams out there and I highly encourage you to share your experiences in the comment section as a warning to others. Please don’t let this discourage you from finding an opportunity for you to build a meaningful future on. Life is too short to work a job which makes you miserable…