Jobs you're applying to might not be real
marketplace.org
marketplace.org
My friend applied for, and got hired as, an external tester. The idea is: you get a web page and a task (e.g. order item xyz), you perform the task and you fill out a usability report, for example explaining which things you found obvious or where you ran into issues. The gig went fine for a week or two with dozens of assignments per day for all kinds of things. Then one of the tasks included opening a bank account at Bank X. This went fine without an issue, and my friend had to use personal data to open that account. She didn’t think any of it - at this point the trust level was high and after all she was supposed to test from an end users perspective, so it kind of made sense to her.
Way later she was asked to apply for a loan, and she did. Of course she did not provide any personal details, but the data the company provided to her - but given how much time had passed she didn’t realize that these data were from the bank account she had opened in her own name. The money arrived, the attackers took it and vanished.
As far as I can tell the scam was set up in a very sophisticated way, faking not only the job but the whole company, with the clear idea that only luring in one innocent person would be enough. And they succeeded.
The worst thing besides the financial damage is the shame that comes with it, the „I can’t believe this happened to me“ moment - which is why I share this here: scams can happen to anybody, including your friends who „should know better“, including you.
From the perspective of the bank it was an existing, verified customer applying for a loan. This was a really, really clever bit of social engineering.
after reading about it, it sounds like a pretty good operation
I too do not understand the angle here vs the crooks just doing it themselves.
It makes me wonder how the scammers transfer the money out, because that all feels traceable. Was she able to find a way out?
She handed it all over to the police and they are on it now. I, too, hope that the money can be traced.
Expedia asked me to test production ticket booking flows using my personal credit card.
It was a flow where you can use a special code to book a refundable ticket. I asked what happened if I forgot to refund it in time, or if something went wrong.
"Don't forget!"
I asked for a corporate card to test with and was denied. I refused to ever input my personal card. I think the team lead said I could use his, but I refused to use anyone's actual, real card.
I was young at the time, and I'm glad I saw the red flags quickly enough and left.
> at this point the trust level was high
As your story demonstrates, this is really what these scams hinge on. It's scary sometimes how easily we can come to trust something.
(on an unrelated note, I setup Monarch (Mint replacement) a couple days ago, which of course requires giving them financial credentials just so they can pull transaction history...)
It seems like a market ripe for exploitation
It surprised me when I ran a small business my bank didn't even require me to file the signatures up front. I just typed in peoples IBAN, the amount, and got it. They never asked for paperwork ever. Naturally, I didn't commit a crime, but I'm surprised with the trust.
So, yes, keep your IBAN secret, it can be enough for someone with criminal intent.
Worryingly, during Covid, a photo of a password was accepted as complete identification in many places (outside Sweden, domestically we have much better electronic ids).
So there is definitely some useful non public data you can steal.
As another comment notes a lot of information is either public or widely disseminated, eg in the US my address is public on the voter rolls and I give out my checking account number every time I write a check.
I’m confused about this. What information, if not her own, was used to acquire the loan? All of loans I have applied for (which is admittedly single digits over the course of my life) required my personal info. If she didn’t use hers for the loan, why did they need her at all after the bank account was set up?
I'm assuming that's the clever bit. The scammers got the victim to apply using their own personal data by hiding that fact behind the account number.
I guess it’s possible the scammers scoped out banks and found the shitty ones with inadequate practices…
This is the line that is confusing me:
> Of course she did not provide any personal details
How are you getting a loan without providing personal details? I’m not aware of an institution that will give you a loan by just providing a bank account number. It seems to be based on the description that the only data that wasn’t personal was the bank account.
Basically has you signup for a bunch of online casinos to get the sign-on/referral promos, but say you're an undercover "tester" for the casino.
Best I can tell, they'll ask you to open up a fresh bank account and coinbase account and they'll fund your buy-ins through USDC that you withdraw yourself. Casinos generally require some amount of play to get the bonus/commissions, so you're "testing" the functionality by playing slots (or they just takeover or remote-coach you on doing it). For sports, it's easy to coordinate off-setting bets that cancel each other out in aggregate at a slight loss. When spread across accounts, this won't be detected.
They probably earn some referral fees on the coinbase and bank account signups too.
It seems you do get paid for the work: they appear too above-board to have virtually zero victim complaints (like actual corporate year-ends on UK's Companies House, corps, mgmt that seem to be real people) and the fraud is just against the casinos. They'll subtly suggest you keep some payment at some of the casinos to withdraw or play, because if you play, the referrer often gets a cut of your losses.
Nice way to get "natural" looking signups and geographically diverse signups that are hard to detect.
I got an invite on Linkedin, and I had a bit of trouble trying to figure out the scheme, so there you have it. Didn't do the "interview" but it was surprisingly polished. Big money in gambling and Customer Acquisition Cost is huge.
I’m not sure how this makes money overall though since the reward money has to be balanced at the population level so the platform always comes out ahead. I suspect there’s an element of getting the employee to gamble with their own money with promises to pay that don’t materialise.
They know, and expect, on x% they won't make that $200 back. This scheme structured itself on increasing that x% and being low-volume enough for platforms to not catch on or redefine their acquisition programme.
And if you are that real customer that will provide that y, you're going to sign on the platform with the big bonuses.
There was some forum post by a platform's "loss officer" looking for info on this scheme. They suggested anyone taking part was "money laundering", but money laundering is a pretty broadly worded offence. The responses weren't sympathetic to an online casino complaining about losing money on more signups.
What I don't understand is... where the hell are the police on this stuff? Checking account fraud is ridiculously easy to pull off - if you know an account number, you can steal an arbitrary amount of money from a checking account. Why isn't it more common? Because the U.S. treasury department comes down like the wrath of God on people they catch doing it. Of course scammers are trying to set up scams and take advantage of people in various clever ways. We're _supposed_ to have police who make things very, very unpleasant for the people who do so, but as far as I can tell, they don't even care.
Even if your friend was given information that was not hers, that’s not any better. To use someone else’s information to apply for a loan is identity theft and wire fraud.
That would be why the fake company had your friend do all of it, because they didn’t want their systems or IPs linked to the federal offenses they were doing, and instead they conned your friend into committing the crime and taking the fall, because if the company packs up and vanishes after the payday, the story your friend gives to the Feds is going to sound like something they probably hear all the time “people who used fake names and a fake company that vanished tricked me into committing wire fraud I swear it wasn’t me”
Your story smells fishy and not realistic imo, but that’s because I’ve known my SSN since I started working and filling out w4s at 14. I’d notice if someone gave me my own ssn to apply for a loan. I’d also never go apply for a real loan using my info or anyone else’s for some company asking me to. What other crimes did your friend commit on behalf of the mystery company?
Right now, there is a big issue with fraudsters pretending to be real companies and posting fake job listings in their names with fake contact info. Some job boards make this way easier than it should be. The "employee" responds and even goes through "interviews" with a fraudster, only to be asked for banking information or ask to pay fees or something like that. Then the fraudster disappears, leaving the "employee" thinking that the real company cheated them. The real company wasn't involved at all.
Be careful out there if you are looking for a job. This is a very common scam right now. Verify contact information with the actual website of the company, not from a job posting.
What I'm far more concerned about with totally fake job listings are the foreign placement agencies that harvest data from resumes and interview native citizens to get information and terminology to prop up their foreign candidate's resume's over the native candidates.
The placement agency makes their candidates look far better based on the information mined from the resumes and interviews, they learn how to speak about technology they don't fully understand. The employee gets a placement, the Business gets a cheap H1B indentured worker, and the Agency gets a fatter commission for selling a "more qualified" candidate.
Sure, we all get wiser as we get older. Would you have known this when you were 22?
I looked at the dumbasses around me buying it with fresh eyes and saw that they were people VERY MUCH not in good places in life and got up and walked out. 2 years of bullshit jobs later, I found my way back to the tech career I went to college for, but in support not development bc degree issues.
I can see trusting or impressionable 18-19 year olds falling for this, especially if this is their first interviewing experience and job offer--they might think it's normal.
I’m seeing more and more applications ask for DEI information like sexual orientation and gender identification too - information that I consider almost as private. I can’t believe anyone fills them out sight unseen.
But as the sibling comment says, wisdom comes with age (mistakes)
Actually if you are of a certain age, you might have been in an era where providing extra information to HR was commonplace. I think for my first job I just filled out my bank account info on paper and did not interact with any payroll software at all.
But I don't remember being asked about DEI information, I am not sure they cared back then.
Except for that last question, I think they're required to let your answer be "I prefer not to answer".
All of the sexual orientation questions are clearly of the latter sort. Neither the federal government nor my state require asking anything about sexual orientation. (And yes I do answer "Prefer not to self identify" to the ethnicity question and all of the employer added ones)
The "you're starting next week but first need to pay X monetary units to cover $bullshit_cost" on the other hand is an old scam.
I have to assume you're using "the other is your identity" in a way different from the thread here where they said all they need to know your name and account number? I have a digital identity which includes a password and multi-factor authentication, but again that's pretty far removed from something like anyone who knows your name and account number can withdraw whatever money they like.
I could say exactly the same a year and a half ago. And then I happened to move to Israel. And I was just as shocked as you would be to learn that most apartment postings say "payment: 12 checks". That means that they want checks for a year in advance. Often the landlord even prefers cash or (in my case) a scheduled transfer in bank app, and returns the checks when they get the money in their preferred way — but "pinky promise there's some money in my account you can have", I like how you put it, is still an important artifact to show your commitment to pay rent.
I did, however, pay one tow truck driver with chairs.
I just quietly never did it, no one seemed to notice. We'll see if it has an effect, but if that was actually real, whoever planned that out should be fired.
I'm pretty sure this is common.
The entire email that was sent out had every red flag for a phishing attempt that you could possibly imagine. absolutely no information in the email that wasn't easily obtainable public information. They sent a username and password, the username was my first name, the password was "<parent-company-name>1", things like that.
yet they were all over a PO who tried to send out gift cards via amazon as a security flaw. and refused to release the emails when the PO reached out to them about it.
there's a reason I don't have much respect for "security" people.
More sophisticated take over might be able to drain all of your accounts, but it is likely to limit your losses to a single pay period.
We've made coding, automation, content creation, and publishing so easy by now that the balance of capability has been tipped to low ability bad actors. And they're gaining the power to make the internet just unusable.
Quite often when you're getting a job at Ford or whatever, you're not actually getting a job at said company but a talent finder or hiring agency under a 90 day contract to hire. Quite often the parent company will have multiple hiring agencies looking for candidates for the same job.
I'm being very cautious, and I'll be curious to see how this plays out.
One of the first "employers" who gave them an interview was extremely kind and willing to pay a decent salary for her to work as a secretary, said she got the job and had her file paperwork including her SSN, full name, current and past addresses, bank information, etc.
Later she had a call from the bank about some suspicious activity, cards were activated, and a pair of expensive shoes was bought under her name. She was not the only one in the waiting room for "interviews" that day and I am sure they stole the identity of plenty of them who were just down on their luck looking for work.
The identity information is still out there in the hands of these crooks. Always vet potential employers.
That's quite some understatement. Last year some 'recruiter' was contacting me with such a scam. The company she purported to represent even put on their web page a warning that they were aware of such dealings. I reported this to LinkedIn, but was told to sod off. LinkedIn clearly only cares whether you pay them.
I've thought about this quite a bit - if I'm ever on the market again, I would only apply to a company that somebody I know already works at so I can verify with them that it's legitimate. It used to be you'd look for referrals to get your foot in the door with a company, now I'd use them in reverse.
* More than half of recruiters ghosted me at different stages of the process.
* Many companies are unreasonably strict with their requirements, asking for x years of experience in their exact tech stack as a deal breaker.
* Pay is much lower than my current company even for more senior roles.
* Some positions are just ridiculous. One of them asked for a ML Engineer with experience in React to maintain a website. Another was completely unable to answer what their business do or what the responsibilities of the role are.
Overall a far cry of the narrative of ML Engineers fending off recruiters who throw wads of cash trying to recruit them.
I suspect that among the hundreds of discarded resumes for a particular role was a candidate who actually believes in the company, would have been fully engaged with the work, and made a serious positive impact on the company’s success.
Maybe they were sick, maybe they were pregnant, maybe they were looking after a dying relative, maybe they were backpacking across South America, maybe they were sitting at home watching every episode of Star Trek, what people do in their own time is a private matter.
* Recruiters ghosting/not following up.
* Companies post dozens of job openings, I apply, nobody follows up (even with a rejection) but keeps posting new positions (looking at you Aha!)
The pay issue hasn’t come up except twice. One company wanted a senior engineer, but only wanted to pay 60k/year tops and you would be on call.
Another company wanted a “volunteer”.
There are other issues for sure. For some companies I do suspect age discrimination, especially with startups.
Ageism is probably the last frontier of job discrimination.
That's not new, though - that's been going on as long as I've been in this business (early 90's). Most people suspect it's an end-run around H1B requirements: they already have a candidate in mind they want to hire, but they have to demonstrate to the government that they "can't find" a U.S. citizen who has the skillset they need.
My experience with job search (Europe) has been full of companies calling me for an HR screener that will promptly inform me that they're on a hiring freeze. Some of them did it at the start of our discussion, some deferred it until the very end.
Not only did this affected my psychology but also my prep. At first, I would reach out to people working at the companies I had an interview with, get the inside scoop. I'd get positive impressions from their engineers, some friendlier than others. All good. Then, as time went on I started singing "let it go" and gave up on reaching out and researching entirely, or I'd half-assed it because everything suddenly sounded too good to be true.
Last but not least, you can tell which companies do that if you follow their Linkedin career page and notice that their job ads receive less applicants over time. It's almost as if people receive it via word of mouth, that or everyone interested is tired of it. But I know a guy who got the door and still ensures that he'll like and share everything they post on Linkedin, in spite of the fact that he's so good that he got offers from Apple and Microsoft before he even graduated, but turned them down for personal reasons.
That is why I stick to the hell that managed to crack a door slightly open to be hired. If people like him have issues, there's a downturn, and companies can afford to play talented candidates like a fiddle who would even hire my 40-year old junior-mid ass to do backend?
Likewise for folks who are employed but looking. They'll keep searching until they land their exit. Again, by then it's too late and they are no longer in the pool.
If you go fishing when the fish aren't biting, you won't catch anything.
If you go fishing when they are, you'll catch as much as you can carry.
You might, but if you have a big enough pool of these people, there's a good probability that one of those people will be desperate enough to pick up that call. It's the same numbers game that causes the same market power asymmetry across all of labor.
It's the prisoner's dilemma - if we all did it, we could effect real change. If somebody else defects, you're just hurting yourself.
[1]: bad joke, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_protocol
Can't believe someone hadn't replied that seriously to your post yet, moments before their job was outsourced.
However much we want to cling to the mythos left over from the days when just knowing HTML and a bit of JS meant you were a rock star coder guaranteed a life of endless riches, that's just not the world we live in and no amount of 10xing harder is going to stop companies from suppressing our wages and benefits while they increasingly outsource and wait for the AI that will absolutely replace most of us entirely or turn us into little more than QA for AI output.
I’m with you on the don’t waste my time angle but not quite with you on the flood them with fake applications front.
I interviewed with a Company recently that was American based but 90% of management and staff as far as I could tell were Indian. The hr rep on the opening screen call was overly hostile and skeptical. It was clear he hadn't actually read my resume until the meeting and then proceed to try to poke holes in my resume. Made subtlety rude comments throughout the whole thing. It felt like I was being provoked or neged.
I think outside of glass door reviews there is little to no accountability for companies during this process.
I started recording (single party state) all my interviews with monosnap and automatic call recording via ringcentral. I've been thinking of making a blog post with a highlights reel.
In academia (at least the country I was in), it's very hard to move up a salary level. There's a lengthy internal, for higher levels even an external, review process with letters of support that have to be written, a panel that meets only every few months, etc. Going from academic level A to B can take six months. It's far faster to have your supervisor create a level B position hypertailored to you and have you apply, for me that took less than half the time. No letters of support, only one interview panel, you can finish all prerequisites in a few weeks.
Plus your supervisor gets to, as it's called in OP's article, 'talent-hoard'; there might be a good CV coming through for a future position.
I've been through the process (married a foreigner), never did they ask anything but biographical details for her and they only cared about my income, not where it came from. (For the form promising that she would not become a public charge.) The whole focus was on whether we really were a couple or it was just a scam to get her a green card.
I briefly ran a platform/SRE team that desperately needed another hire to keep up with the constant stream of interrupting demands from the rest of the organisation while simultaneously being able to dig its way out of the bad conditions that lead to constant interruptions in the first place.
Everyone I talked to in the company (including the interim CTO, finance, and HR) agreed this was a good idea and I had a solid plan for how to do it. I put out all the feelers, wrote kick-ass job ads, got many applications, interviewed some and sent short initial tests to some. Did more in-depth interviews with a few.
Then when it came to discussing concrete relocation plans, benefits, etc. with HR, I got ghosted – by my own HR department! When they finally sat down with me, it was to explain that no, we cannot hire $applicant_category because $bullshit_reason. "But if you find someone within the smaller category we can allow, go ahead!"
So that narrowed down the field and I almost had to start over entirely. And then the same thing happened again! They always found a reason not to hire whatever great person I had discovered. I think in the end – months later – they admitted they didn't want to hire for that position anyway and took down the job ad from the company site. By that point I had realised what a weird place that organisation was and started leaving it.
Either way, HR was completely on board right up until I had a good candidate! They were actually very helpful to begin with, assisting me in summarising information about the company, sorting out potential legal issues ahead of time, finding places to publish job ads, etc.
But they couldn't just tell you whatever applicant attributes they wanted when you talked to them before writing up the listing?
It's possible that the applicant attributes they wanted were a violation of U.S. labor law, but they also knew that as long as they didn't explicitly say it, they couldn't be found guilty of violating the law later, so they leave it to you to guess.
Job seekers are facing a broken, emergent system.
The combination of fake listings, ghosting, and generic emails that provide no feedback seems almost designed to hold them back. There are a few tricks to learn, but without insider knowledge, they may remain undiscovered.
I spend over 20 hours a week searching, tailoring my resume, and submitting applications, only to receive minimal responses. This is demoralizing, not to mention the stress from diminished income.
I actually don't know if this is still a thing, but it was absolutely happening back in the early 2000s. In order to sponsor a TN visa you needed to show several months of trying to find local talent to fill the position. The only proof you actually needed was dated classified ads.
Bad actors always ruin best intentions.
There are some exceptions, such as EB-1s and tenure-track faculty positions, but fake job ads are the norm.
This reminds me of how things sometimes work in totalitarian states. Some everyday things are effectively impossible to do by the rules. The government does not enforce the rules, because it wants the activity to continue. But when they decide they don't like someone, they can start enforcing selectively and show that the undesirable person is breaking the law.
I really don't get the feeling, internally or externally, that most companies are happy with the current situation either. What sort of "defection" do you think they could be doing that would make things better? I interviewed recently with a company that, in my mind, did everything right in terms of an easy and honest interview process, upfront salary and benefits info, all that. I barely got time with the recruiter for it because they had 20+ screens that day because they were swamped with applicants.
This is not an 'emergent' thing - it was this way 20+ years ago when I was starting out. The most important thing I've learned in that time is that all of my best jobs come through people I know.
I've gotten a grand total of one job in 26 years from a 'blind' application, and that was working for a local government who had a very strict interview process.
Build your network, work your network. Read The Proximity Principle by Ken Coleman if you need some direction and inspiration.
Immigration is to keep the wages down. There is no shortage of workers. Its a lie.
Does that kind of migration of workers suppress wages? Why or why not? Does remote work suppress wages since one can live in a remote location with low costs compared to the Bay Area?
When Sam from Kansas moves to LA he gets paid the local rate and switching jobs is hassle-free.
That isn't true of sponsored visa employees - I think that's the parent commenter's point.
Is it a given that all visa holders are paid less than their local equivalent? Would the requirement to pay any visa holder the same as a local candidate be a better solution than blocking people from immigrating? That way you know only the most qualified person is working that position, not the one willing to race to the bottom by working for a lower wage.
But once you take care of all the power asymmetries it would put US and foreign on an equal footing.
However I've also interesting trends where whole departments get formed all of one nationality and the siloing is huge.
TSMC saying there aren't trained locals to work in their factory is laughable. They don't want to deal with American labor standards.
Of course, that only works if you value your time at $0/hour. Applying for jobs for all the different sites, formats, cover letters, requirements, etc, is hard work. And the sites that upload your resume, then ask you to basically type it all back in as part of the application process can all go to hell..
I’m thinking of writing a blog post about my experience in the past half a year of searching because it is insane what the market has become.
Just looked and my current employer has an opening on the careers page that I know for a fact we're not hiring for at the moment.
I have had HR tell me that a candidate everyone loved interviewing for us took another offer; except that candidate messaged me on linked in thanking me for the time spent interviewing them, and thst they were disappointed we passed and what could they have done better?
While I'm not a fan of reaching out to the interviewer like that, it definitely confirmed what I thought about that company; we were never going to replace the people we lost, and all those promises to hire more was never going to materialize.
Unsurprisingly layoffs eventually wiped out most teams, and no, we never did hire the three missing positions. But we definitely had ads out for it.
the changing practices whether there were more ghosts or rejections doesn't tell you why
so that is the limitation, as we cant fit data to match a conclusion, we have to just react to data
When they do want to hire someone, another role gets created, so I suspect no one looks at the resumes submitted, except for statistics perhaps.
I've heard of it in 3 flavors:
The first flavor are businesses do it so their customers/clients/investors don't get nervous - it shows they're on a growth trajectory! They have no intention of ever hiring people for these roles.
The second flavor is similar to the first, but HR/internal recruiters are trying to build out a network of candidates they can cold-call at a later date when/if roles open up again (either because of turn-over or budget).
The third flavor is what I'd call "whale hunting". Basically, they're only interested in very specific candidates that perfectly fit criteria and blow the interviewer away.
This is why I don't invest a lot of time in any specific job until I get high engagement (IE, face-to-face interviews) with people who I will be working with.
I flat-out refuse to do long take-homes without good engagement on the company's end.
It's filled with pages of "Promoted" jobs with 100's of applicants. I'm sure most are still filled, or being filled with the list they already have. If you're a current job searcher (which I'm currently not thank god), you can't make progress. These jobs never get back to you if you apply.
- H1B recruiting
- Legal/government requirement
- Corporate requirement
- Headcount justification, and more.
This is why "applying" by talking to recruiters and hiring managers directly and having them guide you through the application process is significantly more efficient.
Agreed, and I'd like to give credit where it's due. Earlier this week I talked with an nVidia recruiter, and I swear it was like having a concierge service for their application / interview process.
To anyone considering applying there, I guess try whatever OP did to get a recruiter, because applying on their site is a waste of your time and won't even get you a form email back.
I got 3 interviews. The hiring managers were nice, but they just had so many other applicants to choose from that I never made it past the first interview.
- organizations needing to appear successful and growing through job listings (but they're not growing, quite the opposite)
- misleading competitors as to what your direction/stack is or might soon be
- creating a file of possible candidates for a spot that might exist in the future
I interviewed dozens of candidates for a couple roles last year that ended up not being real. Once I finally realized it, I was pissed. Not only was I wasting my time but we were wasting their time and burning my credibility.
I remember looking at an event last year where I'd interviewed 20% of the presenters. :(
This happened to me.
To start the ball rolling I had to unofficially accept a job which did not yet exist. Once they had interviewed a few external candidates they offered me the role without any interview. Only thing I had to do was "apply" to the job via intranet.
Only ever happened to me once though and genuinely felt guilty about the other candidates.
Before, headcount was basically owned by the manager, and s/he filled positions to maintain their headcount.
Now, headcount is always provisional, and typically discouraged. Managers protect themselves by reducing their headcount through attrition. So actually hiring takes sustained effort by a strong manager. The bar is very high because businesses know that hiring one person costs $millions over the typical employee lifecycle.
I strongly believe that despite being paid six figures, the value of my labor is saving my EMPLOYER upwards of six figures by not having to hire expensive consultants with costs that double what mine are.
> “You keep postings out there. You collect a large pool of resumes. You may, in fact, make contact with candidates and interview them, just so you have a large pool of talent,” said Kaplan. “But you don’t plan on actually filling the job anytime soon or hiring.” [...]
> “It gives you a pool that you can very quickly ramp back up,” said Kaplan.
In my opinion this talent hoarding does not make any sense: if you reject a (talented) candidate, he will in all likelihood look for a job somewhere else. Thus when the economy grows again, the respective candidate will likely not available anymore for hiring, because he surely has a job elsewhere (except you are willing to pay an insane salary that is much larger than the candidate's current salary).
I have had family member who had their identity stolen for many years and it kept on going, it's super frustrating.
So... I report the bullshit listings to LinkedIn or whoever; AKA yell at a cloud. Or THE cloud, in fact.
My experience in tech has been that to hire a good employee is expensive. Consuming time from recruiters, HR and hiring managers.
Companies that I’ve worked at that don’t currently require people often lay off the recruiters and HR folk as they scale down hiring.
Clients can still post job openings where they hire nobody but their hiring stats are visible and I can filter out "0 hires" ones. I can only imagine how much healthier the job market would be if employers had to do the same.
The basic job proposal spam you described is designed to keep low-quality clients and freelancers engaged and feeding the platform with money.
Contact me over on Reddit (u/SgtBrutalisk) and I will give you some tips on how to start.
My rationale is that if people actually cared enough to reach out to me personally (we are tiny startup) I would respond honestly.
And yes, if the perfect person came around I would hire them on the spot.
Yes I hear "apply anyway, nobody meets 100% of the requirements!" but unless there happens to be a developer shortage in that area we all know this is horseshit. Unless you have the insider track you are more likely than not to just end up in the reject pile. It doesn't matter how skilled you think you are, your resume won't even get looked at. Plus, if everyone just applies for everything, it compounds the problem: a company has hundreds or thousands of applicants without any means to know which are genuine or not.
Perhaps we should collectively give up on job postings and treat them with the contempt they deserve. Maybe a better approach - other than using your network, assuming you have one - is to put your resume up on your own site or blog and use some SEO for visibility, or maybe we should pool resources to create a simple "hire me" site that recruiters can quickly find people (something better than the awfulness of Linkedin anyway).
we were talking about this a decade ago (he wasnt a VP then). his team would throw out fake adverts and see what bites. how many hits, and how qualified.
their ATS allowed for fields like expected salary, so they could take the temperature of the market and see how many hits, and for how much $$$, they'd get for any particular job.
No scams, just no response. Presumably they purged the PII at some point.
TIA
Also means you'd be walking into a situation where you're taking over a role that the company critically relied on.
I thought this is common knowledge recruiters did that since there was recruiting. Of course they will, why? Because one of the jobs recruiters might do is cold calling, or otherwise contacting companies that are not working with them yet. The conversation usually goes something like this "what positions are you having trouble filling? Oh, really? I have 30 high quality candidates on file that are looking for that position today. I can send it to you in an hour if your company signs a contract with me/us."
And they do, how? They'll invent jobs and advertise them. Usually they'll not even contact anyone that's applied. Then depending on level of integrity of a given recruiter they might just ring/contact the candidate when they really have a position to apply them to (that's fine in my book) or much worse they'll just "tweak the cv" and apply. They might justify it to themselves as "I'm not expecting these 20 people to get the job, I'm just padding the resume of my star 21st candidate I did talk to" etc.
Sadly this practice impacts everyone especially candidates. Imagine you get "ghost" applied like this to a position and you really apply directly or through another honest recruiter. The company will not touch you at all, because they'd have to pay twice the recruitment fees. Or imagine instead of just deleting stuff that's irrelevant the other recruiter decided to "spruce up", your CV? Now it's look like you're lying to your prospective employer...
I'm not here to demonise recruiters. A huge majority of these I worked with during my over 2 decades of work have been honest, but dishonesty exists in some industries to such extent many recruiters I worked with in the UK for example wanted me to sign on paper they are my chosen recruiter exclusively for this position (protecting themselves from another recruiter posting my CV without my knowledge and contesting the fees).
One thing that distressed me at the outset was that the front page of her handout packet was an exhaustive list of job aggregator boards. I was sort of intimidated, like she wanted me to sign up for accounts on all these, fill out profiles, upload résumé, and just sort of roll the dice? That was a lot of privacy invasion for diminishing returns. I had hoped that an expert job coach would be able to help me target desirable employers more accurately.
One thing I've learned about job aggregator boards: they should only be used as a guide. Once you find a job on there, you go back to the original employer's job board and you find the job listing in its pristine form. You can apply direct there without bothering the whole "job board" process. It's really effective, because nine times out of ten, you'll find that the position has been withdrawn or modified and the "job board" version of that listing is a zombie.
Also if you're looking for contract or short-term professional employment, it can be effective to go through an agency. There are reputable agencies and there are fly-by-nights. I found that the best ones had physical office presence near me, and I could go in and be seen by a real person. Some even had qualification testing right on-site. Some of them were really busy with pavement-pounders and some were sleepy little offices with an empty waiting room. The thing about agencies is, they won't be able to disclose stuff until you consent and move forward. You won't know who their client is, or the pay rates or the site location, until you really need to know and you're approved by all parties. So it can be difficult when they're holding all the cards. It takes a little faith and trust that your agency/recruiter knows your background well, and can reliably negotiate a really good match.
In fact I did land my current job in the midst of the pandemic lockdowns by way of LinkedIn "1-click applications". I am still not sure that I directly applied to this company, but I think they found my résumé/profile on LinkedIn, and cold-called me. So glad they did!
95% of your job hunt is about networking. If you have a connection and an introduction, don't bother slogging through job boards as another fish in the pond. Find someone who knows someone. Develop your personal brand and put yourself out there. Don't chase ghost jobs but get good at ATS forms, and use those direct-to-employer corporate "Careers" websites as stepping stones. You'll get noticed!
zero actual substance
1. Con artists socially engineer for resumes for valid data (citing the North Korean worker influx into the gig economy, and various credit scams)
2. Many staffing agency positions are inconsistent with corporate postings. They do this as our corporate legal agreements have an encumbrance requiring we toss duplicate applicants. Thus we can't directly hire anyone also using the same service. Personally I learned this very early in my career, when you find out you are the lowest paid sucker in the room because you entered through agencies.
3. Roughly 23 out of the 350+ local staffing agencies are actually licensed in my town. Its a thread no one wants to tug...
4. unethical research: most wonks don't tell site users their intent is misrepresented. Under the local privacy laws it is a crime to farm data, but folks building goofy "AI HR filters" will waste strangers time too. Only sociopaths get excited hitting people when they are vulnerable.
5. I think it is funnier when former employees/peers leave for bigger opportunities, and people just use their resume reference contact section to identify you as a possible hire.
CVs are often not used as intended friend... it is often illegal... but few care... =)