In her recent Wall Street Journal article, It Isn’t Always a Job Behind an Online Job Posting, Sarah Needleman advises:
If you’re launching an online job hunt for the first time in a while; take caution. What may look like an ad for employment may lead to something entirely different, like a hard sell for career services or job-training manuals. Or worse, it might be a plan by identity thieves to get you to share sensitive personal information via “phishing” expeditions. Some of the job postings — sometimes for positions long filled — also could be from recruiting agencies looking to collect résumés.
A case in point was one job seeker spotlighted in the article who took the bait and drove a distance to meet the firm’s recruiter, only to find himself listening to a pitch for a career service. No job existed.
Despite efforts to weed out the sham ads, some deceptive ads end up on job boards anyway, because scammers are adept at learning how to circumvent the latest filters set to knock them out. They’re a devious bunch who keep coming back and trying new techniques.
If you’re unsure whether an ad is sincere, the article offers some ways to protect your identity when responding.
Fortunately, there are tip-offs indicating that an ad is likely to lead you to a dead end. If you don’t give out confidential information, responding to one of these bogus ads will probably just cost you time and energy.
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A note to my readers:
If you find this post on a blog called “Job Tips” (saboteototal.info) owned by Robin Gupta (robingupta.com) who ironically is an SEO services provider, you are reading content that has been “scraped” from my Executive Resume Branding Blog.
Scraping is a nasty tactic to gain search engine results for one’s website by stealing and publishing large portions of someone else’s web pages, without the original writer’s permission.
In this case, the entire Job Tips blog consists of scraped full blog posts (not excerpts) from my Executive Resume Branding Blog.
Duplicating the content of my blog posts in this way will likely negatively impact the search results for my blog and therefore deeply cut into traffic to my blog.
Shame on you, Mr/Ms. Gupta!
-Meg Guiseppi
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