#OpenToWork Scammers(?)

Having recently been laid off, one of the first things that I did was to come here to LinkedIn, clean up my profile, update the projects list on it, and flip the #OpenToWork switch. Within minutes, I was starting to get pings from people, which was encouraging.

For a while.

I started a conversation with the first one to appear, and made the connection request that they requested, then started to look at the others. At first, everything appeared legitimate, but the conversations in three of the first four cases started getting a little weird. One pressured me to reach out to their suggested/preferred resume advisor. One, after several minutes, apparently tried to send some sort of malware to me in the message system. LinkedIn caught that, and sent an alert that the file was potentially dangerous, so no harm done, but highly suspicious. By the time I could take a deeper look into that person's profile, it had been deleted.

I started taking a more in-depth look at the others who had reached out, and several patterns started to appear that I'm considering to be red flags now:

• They had locations listed outside the US, though some were at least in US territories.
• They had suspect education listings (one claimed to have a Harvard degree), titles (vice presidents) and companies (claiming to work with Amazon).
• They had long swathes of nearly-identical posts or comments on others' #OpenToWork posts, with the exact same text repeated in every case. Usually the structure was something like "Hello <LinkedIn User Name>! I have an exciting opportunity with my company for someone with your skills. Send me a connection request and we can discuss it."
• Those posts or comments did not vary even when the jobs that their targets were looking for varied wildly: The same content was used for people seeking executive leadership positions and facilities management and custodial positions.
• Those posts all happened in very short time frames, and in many cases within the same minute as others.
• Those posts were, almost without exception, the only things posted.

So, obviously, there's some automation going on there. Maybe, in some cases, it was still from legitimate recruiters — I can absolutely understand the desire to generate as many leads as possible, especially if one is getting paid on a placement basis. Even so, the rapid-fire (possibly scripted) conversation items that got sent my way didn't exactly fill me with confidence in placing my future livelihood in their hands, even in part: At best it was a waste of my time, particularly if they couldn't be bothered to actually read the post they commented on or re-posted. Three of those first four asked questions that were answered in my post.

At any rate, for my part, I'm going to use the following criteria to filter incoming connection requests and conversations. If you're really a recruiter, and you want to take up some of my time that I could be spending actually looking for a job, understand that:

• If your profile isn't verified, I'll probably ignore you.
• If your company isn't verified, I'll probably ignore you.
• If I can't find you in the list of employees for your company, I'll probably ignore you.
• If your LinkedIn activity is nothing but automated comments and/or reposts, I'll definitely ignore you.
• If you make the first cut, and I have to tell you more than, say, twice, to read my #OpenToWork post, I'll end that connection immediately, and ignore you: It shows, to my thinking, a lack of attention to detail that I cannot spare the time to correct.

Your mileage may vary.