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Whenever I'm changing jobs, I spend at least half my time worried sick that I'm being scammed somehow. Until now, the "rational" part of my mind thought this was very silly, but I think this goes to show that it's a legitimate concern.

The fact of the matter is that when joining a new institution one lacks the contacts and the context to discern normal institutional behavior because it so often deviates from (seemingly) ordinary, sane human behavior even when nothing is wrong. Having autism, no part of my mind is naturally attempting to cover up this discrepancy: it remains jarring until I manage to "manually" reset expectations.

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> The fact of the matter is that when joining a new institution one lacks the contacts and the context to discern normal institutional behavior

That was the case for me at a couple of very early jobs in my career, but hasn’t been the case for the last couple of decades. New jobs come by way of old colleagues, friends, etc. in such a way that I’m basically never walking in to a completely unknown situation.

If you’re not great at relationship maintenance, use something like LinkedIn. Reach out to former coworkers who you worked well with or got along with, and ask about jobs. Odds are very high that they’d like to work with you again, and will get a referral bonus if it happens!

I've gotten out of the blue recruitment calls, but after my first job via on campus recruitment out of grad school, every job (just a few of them) have been directly through people I knew. Except for essentially pro-forma reasons, I've probably never really needed a resume.

It's been particularly hard interviewing during the pandemic. In usual times, at least you would visit the office and meet some real people in person. Not saying you can't get scammed in person, but it's definitely harder to impersonate reasonably large organisations like that.

Unless maybe it was somewhere I knew people well, I'd be very hesitant to switch jobs in a situation where I only had communicated virtually--unless I had no choice in the matter.

SPOILER: If you want to see an example of scamming people by sneaking into an office and pretending to work in it, watch "Charade" with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn.

I 100% agree. All the hoops you have to jump through and things you need to enter regarding personal information always makes them feel like a honeypot. Not one moment in initial onboarding process do I feel like I'm legitimitely giving my info to HR but some scammer in god knows where.

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