Jobseekers face exploitation as online recruitment is riddled with fake news | Hacker News Reader

Jobseekers face exploitation as online recruitment is riddled with fake news

newstatesman.com

87 pointselsewhen42 comments

This stuff is so much worse than the article lets on.

The worst fake jobs are money mule scams, meaning that these poor job seeking individuals will likely run around town "doing work" and end up $2k - $20k in the hole, depending on how eager they are.

Manager sends them a check to deposit, then asks them to take care of some payments. This can be standard ("you'll be running payroll, we are a small company so you can just do it from your account"), or they can try to make it seem small ("I need to send some iTunes gift cards to these top customers as a thank you, you can take the leftovers as a bonus because you've been doing great").

The checks don't bounce for a few days, even a few weeks sometimes, so the confidence grows and they keep doing more. Then like clockwork the money they deposited into their account disappears but at this point they've spent thousands and have no recourse to get it back (and now they are effectively burned from using banking)

Oh is this the source of the "make thousands from home" ads?

I am still not clear how this works - and would it not be in the interests of police etc to loudly proclaim how this works so people can spot it?

A lot of the 'make money from home' ads are MLM too, with a similar effect on the unlucky recruits' bank balances.

All MLM s come with a sell the idiots the tools scam, in addition to the regular MLM scam.

I think these ads front a range of schemes, from boring old check fraud (as described) to pyramid schemes to money muling.

For those of you currently looking for a job: you have my sincerest pity. A few months ago, I too was job searching and it was an absolute nightmare.

Just one example from many: A while back, one of the few people who responded to my application was a "sales" job. The more experienced among you will already know where I'm going with this.

I looked at their website and the warning lights were going off in my head. What I was actually supposed to be doing there was never really described. Luckily, whoever designed the website and related marketing materials was kind enough to fill all the unused space with politician grade word salad non-information. This was all peppered with appeals to greed and images of high ranking executives enjoying themselves (THIS COULD BE YOU!!!).

I then checked their reviews from previous employees and it was universally panned. One previous employee described it as a cult.

For once, my cowardice and willingness to abort paid off. I cancelled by phone ON THE MORNING OF MY INTERVIEW while in bed. I later read a forum thread on "multilevel marketing" schemes and instantly felt the life being breathed back into me. I had just dodged a major bullet.

The moral of the story is: If something seems off, trust your gut! There's plenty of large power structures designed solely to fuck with you. This goes double for if you're young and inexperienced and don't really know the lay of the land.

On the higher end of the job spectrum MLM is not common. They usually just ghost you totally because it never was a real job on the other end. The number of jobs I have seen that are obvious 'by our policy we put this on the internet' is astounding. Tell tales of that is large amount of very specific requirements for a job and very low pay, basically a copy pasta of someones resume. I also see a lot of what I call reflection scams. Basically some recruiter copying some other job listing to try to become the middle man. You are usually better off searching for unique phrases in the description and finding the original posting.

On the lower end MLM is rampant. Most of the ones doing it do not understand the math behind what they are trying to do. They are in the 'cult'. They honestly think they are 'growing their business' by recruiting and honestly wasting peoples time. Once you show them they need a large city sized group of people in their tree to make anything they usually drop out. Easy things to look for are 'be your own boss' 'work to your own rules' some crazy amount of money per week for no exp etc etc etc. Another common one I see is package laundering. Which is a scam where you pick up what is essentially stolen packages and re-mail them to someone else. Usually associated to some stolen credit card. At some point you will be left holding the bag when they fold up shop.

One thing I've noticed in my more recent job searches before starting my company was that this kind of spam exists at all job search levels.

I'm really getting the feeling that online applications to jobs are rapidly becoming next to useless, it really feels like this market is ripe for disruption, and I've been thinking for a while about how this could be done.

A lot of people have tried.

The biggest problem in this space IMO is that there’s so much more money on the recruiting side than the job-seeker side of this exchange, which means that recruiters are ultimately going to play a much bigger role in the product development than the job-seekers.

Job-seekers don’t want to pay to look for work, but recruiters are more than happy to. Until that imbalance is figured out, job posting spam is gonna reign supreme.

Job-seekers are legally prevented from paying to look for work in my jurisdiction. It may be a while until that imbalance gets fixed.

Recruiters impacting product development seems so obvious of a link but I've never thought of it that way.

Makes me wonder what effect referral bonuses have on an org. People might be more likely to refer people who are similar to themselves, so you might end up with more of the same. Which could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on who's already in...

Yeah, ultimately the users of your product define how it’s built and what features it needs. And if your goal is to build something profitable, you’re gonna go after users that are willing to pay over those that aren’t.

It’s hard to say what impact referral bonuses have. I know that most of my network does not appreciate being solicited for new opportunities, but I don’t know how often referral bonuses are actually paid out.

From my experience the only thing that ever worked is when the recruiter comes to you.

Connecting with recruiters and messaging them also helps sometimes.

Only on sites that have free/scraped job posts like LinkedIn and Indeed. On sites where you pay for listings the quality is substantially higher.

This sort of 'perseverance porn' has been a problem for a while now:

https://fair.org/home/medias-grim-addiction-to-perseverance-...

https://fair.org/home/media-just-cant-stop-presenting-horrif...

> ideological agitprop meant to obscure and decontextualize the harsh reality of dog-eat-dog capitalism.

That's a strange word for them to use. How often English speakers use it?

> Agitprop (/ˈædʒɪtprɒp/;[1][2][3] from Russian: агитпроп, tr. Agitpróp, portmanteau of agitatsiya, "agitation" and propaganda, "propaganda")[4] is political propaganda, especially the communist propaganda used in Soviet Russia, that is spread to the general public through popular media such as literature, plays, pamphlets, films, and other art forms with an explicitly political message.[5]

it's not an uncommon word to use. I see it informally on twitter a lot but it's used in media as well.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anytimes.com+agitprop

Fun coincidence, I’m reading “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates and I just picked it back up and read:

“... young students like me who confused agitprop with hard study.”

Not often, but it basically made sense from the context, anyway.

It's a common enough term of art in political discussions. I wouldn't think twice about using it.

another thing i noticed is that every job posting will have a slew of fake applicants apply to it as to discourage people from applying. had a friend who wanted to apply for a job, however it said that 100 people or so already applied on indeed. i told her to apply anyways. she got a call that day from the manager and when she asked them how many other applicants there were, they told her 3. manager even confirmed that most applications they were getting were blatantly fake.

What is the end game of someone flooding in fake resumes?

If you are working with a service that promises you applicants for that hard-to-fill position, well, the end game is money and a promise delivered. They can't really help the quality of applicants, after all, since they don't discriminate and aren't actually doing the hiring.

right now alot of people are looking for work. the less people that apply, the better your chances are of getting the job. so if you see that only 3 people have applied, then you apply and flood indeed so it shows over 100 people applied, chances are noone else will apply. your odds of getting the job have gone up.

I'm guess the "fake" resumes are just people with really, really bad resumes. Which is easy to do on linkedin (I don't know about indeed), because you just click one button to submit whatever you've chosen to fill out.

When I was job hunting in Seattle a few months ago, fake copies of job postings on LinkedIn outnumbered real postings two or three to one. For every real Facebook or Amazon posting there were several copies with no logo that redirected to data collecting websites. I flagged dozens as fake, and days later they were all still there.

I have been going back and forth with Linkedin the on this very topic. So help me out. Here is the list I have of 3rd parties.

https://www.jobleads.com https://www.jooble.org/ https://www.ihireadvertising.com/ https://www.neuvoo.com is part of https://www.recruiter.com/ http://www.jobsflag.com https://adzoona.com/ https://www.startwire.com/ https://eu.experteer.com/ https://us.experteer.com/ https://www.executiveplacements.com/ https://www.resume-library.com/ https://www.joveo.com/

Everyone complains about LinkedIn and recruiters. But I get zero spam these days. I think it’s a combo of a setting adjustment (there’s a toggle you can turn off if you are not available for hire) and the fact that I’m clearly using a pitch for my gig/business in the tag line. So if you are inundated with recruiters, but still find LinkedIn useful for networking - try those two things. I literally don’t even remember when a recruiter reached out to me the last time.

The line next to my name, and the first line on my profile are "Not looking for work". I still get spam.

Aha! I always knew Brigitte Hyacinth didn't hire that person who was 50 mins late just because of his sheer determination to be able to make it to the interview after being stuck in traffic, instead of leaving an hour earlier like other candidates.

I was stuck in traffic for hours and had to abandon my car but I was on a mission to like your post so I managed to crawl all the way to my keyboard one suburb over to give this comment a like!

I have to say its not often that someone I don't know in person is annoying enough for me to actually remember their name from social media spamming but this is an example.

Most job ads - especially in the tech industry - are already basically fake news, aren't they?

fake news is not even the right term for this. It is just con-men.

It's a bummer and wholly unnecessary that such a partisan, politically loaded term as "fake news" wound up in this story. It forces anyone who objects to the usual usage of "fake news" to either swallow their tongue if they want to participate in the conversation, or more likely, opt out.

It isn't limited to tech, but tech has been pretty bad in this area for years. Especially where it concerns recruiters posting fake jobs just to harvest CVs.

The most interesting example I've seen of this lately is a large publicly traded company most people on HN would know. They have dozens of job listing on their career page with no actual open role. If you apply, they route you into other roles. It's a complete bait-and-switch.

I've ditched everything except for Real Talk. I'm not throwing my resume into a form hole, I'm not responding to recruiters. I email someone I would be working with directly until they start the hiring process. This precludes me from working at any large company, in my experience they just beat me around the algorithm and HR bushes for 1 to 6 hours then send me a canned rejection from their no-reply address. It's a complete waste of my time.

Same here, pretty much. It's like their basic strategy has come to be:

"It's all about the funnel! Got to get more people in our hiring funnel! But wait, we don't actualy know how to evaluate them effectively and efficiently (or even how to communicate with them decently). So... let's just get a bunch of people "engaged" and see who washes up at the end. That way, we can at least tell the higher-ups that thanks to our diligent hiring process, we can go online and brag about how we only hire the top 2 percent of incoming candidates."

Spam is a big social problem and capital aggregators have a perverse incentive to go along with it because it creates the appearance of demand. Education and filtering just shoves the problem back on good faith participants. We've been dealing with this problem for 26 years now; maybe it's time to stop handing out bandaids and look at the underlying structural issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...

LinkedIn is website designed to make us hostages to recruiters, and Brazil has always been huge on kidnappings. Match made in heaven

Maybe platforms should put in anti-viral measures, like only randomly promoting stories to the top? Fuzzing the number of likes and dislikes, reducing the importance of influencer?

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