This is the appropriate place to share the following anecdote, which happened to a friend of mine (disclaimer - in the context of this comment and how I wrote it I assume you will immediately notice the red flags, but I assure you these are only obvious in hindsight)
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.
There is a company that kinda does this with online gambling.
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.
The get a bonus for referring users (get $100 if you sign someone up that plays for xxx) and signing up (get $100 if you sign up and play for yyy) to the platform. The platform wants to attract gamblers but instead is getting people ‘doing a job’ that are probably significantly less sticky. Is that illegal or just against the T&Cs of the platform? Im not sure.
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.
Overall the platforms play a numbers game. Pay $200 to get a new customer, because, on average each customer makes them $200 + y. But there's a toooon of variability.
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.
Hindsight? When I test our app, I don't use my CC, I ask the company for one or for mock data that would pass through the production system. I would never use my personal information to tie my personal finances to my employer for a work task. That's just setting yourself up for problems like your friend found.
The trick here was that of course my friend did not use her own sensitive bank information to ask for the loan - she asked for test data, and the company provided her with data. What she did not realize is that the data they fed her were things she had created in her own name earlier in the scam. For example, she opened a bank account in her own name quite early, after some trust was built. The data she used for that didn’t seem that sensitive to her, and she made sure the account was not a paid one and so on. And she was right - that account in itself was not what screwed her over. Days to weeks, and dozens of assignments, later when she applied for the loan, the test data they provided to her upon her request were partly from that opening of a bank account. So from her perspective it was a competely new flow to test for an existing customer - the bank - with test data provided. They even changed the login data a bit so that it looked like a different account.
Since this was framed to der as a test as close to reality as possible it didn’t seem off that the „test account“ showed her her own name.
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.
I'm sorry this happened to your friend. It's surprising that the requisite data for her to open a bank account was not considered too personal. I opened a bank account not long ago and it felt like they wanted to know every vague thing about me. It's a good reminder to set safeguards so that routine does not desensitize you to dangers.
It makes me wonder how the scammers transfer the money out, because that all feels traceable. Was she able to find a way out?
So the thing is - when you start at a new company you also need to submit all kinds of personal data - to the company you are starting in. I am a bit fuzzy on the details here but I think the data needed to open a bank account might be the same.
She handed it all over to the police and they are on it now. I, too, hope that the money can be traced.
I don't understand. What prevented the scammers from just performing all the same operations she performed using the data they had about her? They could have her run some gateway on her laptop so all network access would appear to come from her IP address. Is there some offline interaction that is required to open an account?
For the same reason people who steal credit card numbers sell them rather than use them, why illegal drug distributors don't sell to users directly, and mob bosses don't rob people: They can probably do the same thing at the same time with multiple people, and it reduces their risk exposure. If 10 different people open up a bank account with stolen credentials, the bank has to detect fraud 10 different times. If one person opens up 10 bank accounts with stolen credentials, they're way more likely to catch onto a subtle pattern.
plausible deniability? why commit the crime yourself when you can have someone else do it for you? also, the loan would probably only be offered to a US citizen while the scammers were most likely not.
after reading about it, it sounds like a pretty good operation
I can only guess, but my best guess is that one crucial part is performing the ID validation, which involves joining a video call with a company that partners with the bank.
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.
Considering how much personal data you have to give to a legitimate employer, seems like the scammers just invoked a lot of unnecessary effort in making the applicant fill out the loan paperwork themselves.
Difference might be in voluntarily making bank account and applying for loan and impersonating person. One might be punishable as criminal offence, other as minor scam (not sure about proper legal terms). Also in certain jurisdictions it makes sense as different police units investigating certain crimes and scammers might be connected.
I think about this a lot - wouldn't it be super easy to just pretend to be offering a job that pays a tiny bit more than most might expect, then steal all the personal data you inevitably hand over for employment reasons?
For Swedish citizens, most of that data is already public. Addresses and everything. Exactly which data do you envision causing problems? It's not as if you can draw money just by knowing someone's bank account number.
I was asked for a copy of my passport for several of my last jobs (in Sweden).
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.
During COVID in my personal experience, a lot of financial institutions waived things like coming into a branch or getting a notarized signature. Also in my experience most things have gone back to where they were before.
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.
Actually, you can, with a business account. You need to collect proof that you have permission, so that you can produce it when asked, but technically I can deduct money from any (national?) bank account right now with nothing more than the IBAN.
To do so fraudulently seems like a really good way to go to jail, though, no? And, as a requirement to hold your business account, the authorities know where to find you to put you there should the need arise?
Of course. But that's what were discussing here right, ways people might commit fraud. If people can popup businesses for fake, fraudulent jobs, I wouldn't think this kind of fraud is out for them either. And in some jurisdictions, being hard to trace as a business beneficiary is actually not difficult.
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.
> 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.
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?
She opened the bank account and applied for the loan at separate times. So she wasn't aware that the loan being applied for was related to the bank account previously made.
> 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.
Exactly. From her perspective, she had Task A: open a bank account for client SomeBank, performed that task and way later had Task B, apply for a loan at SomeBank. It's not at all suspicious to perform those tasks for the same customer, and the "test data" given to her looked legit (it's because they were the actual data from Task A)
I still don’t get it. Presumably there’s more information needed to apply for a loan than a bank number, such as name, DOB, and address (and maybe SSN or other personal ID, depending on country). What data was used for that?
Thanks for this story, and for mentioning the key point
> 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...)
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.
Your friend sounds like they are not telling you the truth, because applying for a loan requires a social security number and your friend would have noticed being given their own.
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?
A buddy of mine got the exact same "recruiter" cold-call message. Luckily we sniffed out the scam but I can totally understand why someone wouldn't pick up on it.
While the article is about companies who post job options that aren't actively being hired, there's another worse issue going on with actually 100% fake job listings.
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.
Maybe I'm an exceptionally paranoid person (high probability) but I would never ever ever send payment or my payment info if I am looking for a job. I will input that into a HRM application like Workday or ADP, but no salary could convince me to give up that information directly before I've signed legal paperwork like a contract or tax documents.
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.
You’re not exceptionally paranoid. The only time I ever reveal bank information is after signing an employment agreement and it’s always on the direct deposit authorization provided by ADP/Gusto/w.e HR software they use, never to a company representative.
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.
In the U.S., I think employers are required to ask specific questions about ethnicity, gender identity, veteran status, disabilities, and if you're authorized to work in the U.S.
Except for that last question, I think they're required to let your answer be "I prefer not to answer".
Those questions are usually at the end of the job application and when you've filled out enough of them, you can tell the difference between one platform's legal boilerplate and questions added manually by the employer.
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)
hell, I once had my company send out an email that I was sure was a phishing email. I reported it and was told that, nope, they really did want me to re-upload all of my tax documents to this shady ass URL.
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.
Back when I was younger, I was phone support for a phone company's DSL department. They sent out an email telling the customers that we'd never send emails asking for their passwords. Then, less than 3 weeks later, they sent out a mass email telling customers that we had security issues and that they needed them to send their passwords to us.
people should honestly be fired over things like that.
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.
Maybe somebody in HR goofed up and didn't keep required documentation. They didn't want to admit their mistake so they couldn't squawk about you not doing it.
I don't think that jut payment info on its own is harmful to send; that's just your name + bank account number, no? Maybe it's different in other parts of the world, but I don't really see how anyone can really do anything with that.
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.
Someone's name and bank account number are enough to write a bad check. The system was designed with a certain amount of trust in mind, and the expectation that the customers will behave in a way that makes scammers obvious.
We don’t even use checks where I live, so still seems like a geographical thing. I can print out my bank account number and put it on a billboard and all anyone can do is deposit money.
Are you sure about that? In Europe Iban is half the info (the other is your identity) needed to create a SDD on an online shop. Granted, you have a year to contest charges and get the money back, but still.
Pretty sure. Every company I interact with puts their IBAN on their invoices, as do I. I have IBANs for several friends and they have mine. I know the names of all these people. HSBC at https://www.business.hsbc.uk/en-gb/solutions/iban-and-bic says you're supposed to give it away to anyone who you want to make a payment to you - presumably they wouldn't do that if it was also the golden ticket to take money out of your account knowing only their name. Or at least they'd be very careful to say that you absolutely should make sure that anyone who pays you doesn't know your name (although, that sounds ridiculous).
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 see. checked around some provider apparently sepa direct debit is only in selected european countries, it's scary because you just need iban + email to get started, albeit it will likely ask 2fa from the mobile app if one has it set up.
We have sepa direct debit here where I gave you the examples, and nobody is able to withdraw from each others accounts using the payment info we are all giving to each other. It’s not possible to set up a bank account without a password or 2fa.
What? Who would accept a cheque for anything in 2024? Sure, here's a piece of paper that says if you go to the bank I pinky promise there's some money in my account you can have. I'm nearly 40 and have never used a cheque in my entire life. They were outdated 30 years ago.
> I'm nearly 40 and have never used a cheque in my entire life.
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.
Last year my father in law passed away. While dealing with the estate I had to write perhaps 20 paper checks and received a similar number from various sales. Many of the vendors we dealt with only accepted paper checks or cash.
I did, however, pay one tow truck driver with chairs.
Just a reminder that everyone should setup a dedicated account for incoming money. Direct deposits go here, and then are transferred to a different account.
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.
Yes, it would never have made sense to me to pay money to someone to earn money. I was 18/19, and had stupidly dropped out of a college I hated for a relationship and found a job posting in the paper for a "warehouse job". I called, they said come in for an interview. I was ecstatic, what a win! My girlfriend drove me there, and it was a door-to-door steak sales job. They told me all the usual you can make so much money doing this, you work your way up and make connections and grow your area. They told me at the end when I was almost into it that I would have to buy the steaks from them and pay myself off the difference.
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.
"This is not a job--it's a business opportunity, and like all business opportunities, it requires a meaningful up-front investment from you. This investment buys you access to the tools you need to [...]" - Fraudster
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.
> there's another worse issue going on with actually 100% fake job listings.
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.
Point taken but the job platforms must be doing a terrible job with countermeasures. I don’t think in many cases these countermeasures need to be that advanced, it doesn’t sound particularly hard for a job posting website to verify that someone works at Ford or whatever.
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.
Also be aware that any job that asks you to pay them as a condition of employment is a scam. This doesn’t apply just to the scenario above but also MLM schemes for example.
A member of my family was applying for jobs about 9 years ago and they had very little adult work experience but needed the income and health insurance.
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.
Entirely possible the interviewer was hired by the bad actor to do the interviews and gather the info. Find someone with HR experience, tell them you're setting up a new office, blah blah, then they won't even feel like they're lying because they really don't even realize they are.
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.
> Some job boards make this way easier than it should be.
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.
especially if they are posting that salary — an awful lot of companies like to keep salaries secret and (illegally) discourage discussion. Posting a salary for Position XYZ which is higher than current employees doing XYZ is a good way to generate discontent. But dangling a fat juicy carrot to lure suckers into a fraud? ...
There is also another kind, job postings that then send you coupons to use some company service, i got few times like, oh thanks for applying to company distrupting travel, while you wait here a coupon to use our services
I don't know about fake jobs, but as a ML Engineer looking, my experience has been appalling, despite all the AI/ML hype. I'm tempted to write a blog post about it, but the highlights are:
* 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.
The non responses are really demoralizing. I can take a form rejection letter. You can even lie to me and say the position is closed. Just do not leave me hanging with some scrap of hope.
Aha! advertises as far as New Zealand and I also never heard back when I applied. The excuse they supply (at least they do that much…) is that they receive too many applications to respond to everyone. But then why advertise all over the world? A scummy tactic when I think about it.
That’s been my experience too, and it sucks. Looking for a job now is hellish compared to 10 years ago and I kind of don’t know what to do about it. I feel like more in-person connections would be useful, but god I don’t want to start going to meetups and networking and informational interviews again.
After addressing the companies correctly and compiling latex CV for the specific posting, the smartypants will still find repulsive three months of a gap here and there and few failed trial periods... so here it is - "Dear McCompanyFace, ....".
"Yeah, Karen, I took 3 months, cuz I would like to enjoy life while I can and not have to wait til I'm 90 and frail and dying before I get time to myself. I'm responsible enough with my money I can do so, I see that as a benefit, but you do you. See ya, hope you find a more satisfying job that can see hope and potential in people and liberated desires instead of being chained to that desk and wanting others to suffer just as much as you."
Oh yeah, I hate that. I know a guy who is a network engineer. He got burned out by the workload at his old company, quit, and took 6 months to hike the entire Appalachian Trail because old company wouldn't let him take that long of a break. So after finishing up and taking a maybe two week vacation to recuperate from the hike, he starts applying for jobs again and whaddaya know: "We see here that there's a 7 month gap here, have you been on the market that long [gasp!] or did you have another role after that?"
Because it’s none of their business. An interview is there to evaluate a candidate’s suitability for a role, not to dig into their personal life. What they did at work is relevant, what they did when not working is private. You wouldn’t ask what someone did on a Saturday night.
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.
That is correct, which is why the hiring atmosphere reeks of ageism. There's a lot of people in this industry that are over 40, healthy, of sound mind, and have a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience that are being overlooked because they're supposedly "not agile enough" or whatever.
When you have 168 resumes to skim through, you can “afford” to just pass on this application and choose some others to interview that would be less offensive to office sensibilities. The impact of accepting so many false negatives is difficult to quantify because you don’t know which ones would have truly been good fit.
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.
One can do best sending the right signals - custom motivation letter, custom CV, but some interns or overzealous puritans will dig out other non-negotiable red flags. Thus, the tiny probabilities of success make it not worth to address the CV and letter correctly.
Translation: It's not worth it to write a cover letter or optimize your resumé for a particular job, because you won't make it through the screening process anyway.
> asking for x years of experience in their exact tech stack
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.
I've been unemployed for the last 5 months and finally managed out of sheer luck to land a gig that sounded sweet on the outside but it's hell in the inside, and I really need the money. But I digress.
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?
Man, do I feel this reply. This pretty much describes exactly where I'm at right now, except that I'm still searching. I've tried everything, including dropping everything except the most recent roles off my CV to accentuate the fact that I've kept up and I'm not a "dinosaur" or "grey beard."
The issue I have with this is that humans are not resources like businesses want to think they are. They are living beings with, gasp, memory. If I applied to a job I thought I was a great fit for, got a call with an initial recruiter, only to be ghosted - I'm going to remember that when they call 6-12mo later. By then I'd have already found a new gig with something tangible and have already ramped up on it, I'm no longer in the pool.
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.
I've been actively punishing companies that waste my time. Oh, two rounds of interviews only to learn it was an internal hire completed before I ever applied? Enjoy having every one of your listings have thousands of applications a day for the next six months, all just real enough to be plausible. The system is actively being weaponized against people looking for work to keep a power imbalance, might as well be a two way street.
But then where do you go to cut through the noise? Recruiters and talent agencies? Do we need to establish a union of “real people coders”? How does this not escalate into more fakeness?
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'm going to remember that when they call 6-12mo later.
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.
Even better is when you implement a gossip protocol[1] and ensure that not only did they burn the bridge with you, but with 1000 other people in your network / degrees of separation.
This is something unions and guilds were great at. They could easily collect data on how companies treated their members and communicate that effectively to all members in that industry. It left companies terrified of screwing over the workers because it killed off a massive segment of the labor pool they could draw from, especially the segment which contained the most skilled workers.
I have no doubt there are some people here who have skills so hard to find that it can overcome in inherent power asymmetry between employers and workers, but that isn't true for most workers, or even most tech workers.
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 hate the term 10x for this very reason. You’re going to put 10 times the amount of effort vs what they pay you only to be let go in the next round of layoffs while the CEO gets a bigger bonus.
I think that's a deep misunderstanding of "the 10× programmer". They produce 10× of the useful output, but they don't necessarily work that much harder.
Another thing I've run into is fake postings to fulfill h1b requirements. I don't fully understand the requirements but sometimrs companies have to have attempted to fill a role for a year before they can bring in somebody else.
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.
I've also run (and even participated in!) in academia.
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 think it's a time-wasting game (personally, I'm ready to play that game with all those companies). I think that finally those companies will quit that game before we do. Reason: the number of those companies is much less than the number of people looking for jobs. For example, if I waste 30 mins applying for a job, doing interviews at company X, then that company X must waste at least 15 mins to process my application and conduct an interview.
I suspect I've had my time wasted on some of these as well. Whether it's H1B or some "policy" that requires the company to go through the motions of publicly posting a job and interviewing, when in fact they want to do an internal hire or something.
Why did they even need to make the interview process so hostile? They could have made it perfectly normal and the say they found a better candidate, it's not like the applicant can appeal if he or she felt it had gone well...
For an H1b part of the requirement is that the company has not found any citizens who will take the job - only if they can show that will the visa be issued to their prospective overseas candidate. So, they make the interviews with citizens as unpleasant as possible, so that none of them will take the job. It's a massive waste of everyone's time.
Green Card has no job involved. It's the result of meeting certain conditions.
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.
this is not true. I think green card application can be submitted and approved even before work started (though this probably very rarely happens), employer just need to go through certification process(prove that job requires education and skills) and prove that there is no local competition for the job.
The nerve to post a fake job ad, and interview you someone just to gaslight them. That's actually somewhat funny.
Creative bullying of a whole new level.
An explanation that isn't brought up by the article is plain mismanagement.
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.
> they couldn't just tell you whatever applicant attributes they wanted
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.
They were lying. They didn't actually want to hire anybody, but wanted to pretend they were, so they change requirements whenever it looks like somebody might actually meet them.
This was also one of my first questions. They made it sound like there were a lot of small nuances and they could not afford to spend the time working them out in detail ahead of time.
It was in the hundreds of employees, but upper management liked to run it as if it was in the thousands. I don't know which of those answers is more meaningful as an answer to your question.
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.
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.
And those same employers will scream from the mountaintops that workers don't exist and the only solution is to import more labor from places that just happen to have far lower wages.
In fact some employers will create listings with very specific requirements they have no intention of filling so that they can site it during visa applications.
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.
Most employment-based green cards for people already in the country require a fake job listing. If a company is willing to go through the trouble of sponsoring a green card for an existing employee, they are obviously not interested in hiring a replacement. But the government makes them pretend they are, because there are no other ways of keeping the employee.
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.
> Job seekers are facing a broken, emergent system.
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.
Emergent? Hardly. Employers love it this way. I'm not saying there's a centrally-coordinated conspiracy at play, but there's certainly very little incentive for any individual employer to "defect" from the current equilibrium.
Do they? Everyone I know in recruiting is stressed out of their minds wading through thousands of applications, meanwhile it's taking 6+ months to even get a double-digit amount of interviews with vaguely qualified candidates for important roles that we were offering pretty good salaries for.
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.
It sounds kind of like the online dating dynamic: One side spams requests into the void, knowing they're going to get MAYBE a 0.1% response rate, and the other side is inundated with requests and are overwhelmed with the task of sorting through the 99.9% unacceptable ones. Everyone is looking for drinkable water. Candidates are in a desert with no water in sight and employers are in a swamp full of water--none of it drinkable.
How do you feel about internal migration? Like people moving from rural areas to urban areas for work? The classic, Kansas to New York or California?
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?
Why shouldn’t a sponsored visa employee be paid the same? LA costs the same whether you are a citizen of the US or not. Do we know for a fact we all suddenly would get pay raises if all migrants were deported and we stopped handing out visas?
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.
H1B sweatshops are typically operated by migrants from the same countries the peons they recruit from. They run their (to a huge extent legally captive) workforce within the social framework of their home country and usually with full understanding of the indenture situation by the workers.
So really the issue is the migrants are being abused and deserve better working conditions. With better working conditions where they receive equal pay and benefits as a local person then really companies would only hire visa holders if they were more qualified than local talent and thus more deserving of the position because of how many extra hurdles hiring a migrant and sponsoring a visa would add.
Basically correct. One other element to note though is that employers love H1B because they know it gives them huge power over the employee because the employee must leave the country immediately if they are fired and it can reset the whole process.
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.
> Once upon a time, a posting that’s been open for a while might be a red flag. Now, Salemi encourages job seekers to apply anyway. If you do get an interview, ask about the company’s hiring timeline.
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..
As a current job seeker, this certainly _feels_ right. But how true is it in actuality? Is anyone able to confirm or deny this practice (at least anecdotally) for companies they've been at?
I can confirm that some companies leave job postings up to seem like they're thriving for optics, and/or to pacify overworked undermanned teams for a bit longer.
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 company knows they had no money to hire. Butthe managers keep saying they are short-staffed. so they let the managers do the song and dance, only to pull the rug from underneath them when it came time to actuallly commit
I've known some corporate recruiters personally and I thought I'd heard most of the hiring horror stories. I have _never_ heard of this, and now I'm wondering how prevalent it is.
Well, this is second hand (thankfully my company doesn't do it) but I know through friends and colleagues at other companies some places definitely are doing something like it.
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.
I can definitely attest that "open position" is a much more abstract concept in the tech/software industry than people think. It is rare for a company to have a slot on a specific team that they have to fill immediately. Hiring is instead more about finding generally smart people and holding on to them. So companies can afford to take as little or as much time as they want in hiring and also can hire 0 - N people for a single open position.
That's not been true in my experience. Engineering figures out how many people they want, finance tells them how many they'll get, and that number of people gets hired. But maybe it's true at really small early-stage companies.
On the other end, that's also extremely true at large companies. My last job, all hiring was functionally locked in at the fiscal year rollover. There was no emergent need so large that the budget could allow you to hire anyone new until the next year. Didn't matter if the entire team was about to quit (and then nearly did) because of understaffing. Budget was budget.
I’ve worked at a few companies that also are just super slow about removing job listings that get filled. There is not much incentive to drop it, and lots of different incentives of leaving it up.
Yeah this is my experience - or even: we definitely need to hire for position x (go through all the approvals etc., post a job) then something changes and maybe we don’t need to hire the person ASAP, but maybe in ~ 6 months, and it ends up easier to leave the posting up and see what comes in with a tighter aperture (since this is now went from high to low priority) - there is actually an open rec but it’s like a 1% chance of getting hired today vs maybe a 5% chance in a few months…
> As a current job seeker, this certainly _feels_ right.
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.
Im also looking for a job and this does seem very much the case, and I have some hints based on the ways they answer, the exact timeframe between companies with nothing in common and how often they update their listing amongst other things.
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.
With AI it's only going to get worse. Fake companies with fake interviewers to get samples of your voice so they can fake you as a remote employee somewhere. I feel job boards and social media and the like aren't ready for the onslaught of fakes coming like a tsunami from scammers. I could be wrong. I'm wary of even talking on the phone anymore to numbers I don't know.
This is next level nefarious, but an entirely believable prediction of what’s to come in this area. Voiceprint theft will become a huge problem beyond just job seeking, and this line of thinking has given me a whole new list of reasons to never pick up the phone (or start disguising my voice).
Can't speak for how things are operated now that Broadcom has taken over, but when I was at VMware (departed in 2020), it was an open secret that there were job roles posted to fish for 'good candidates' that there was no immediate intention of hiring for unless a particularly valuable candidate showed up in the pipeline.
it's long been common knowledge that companies will keep active listings hoping to catch a unicorn employee, but generally not actually hiring reasonably good candidates. It's also a form of status/competition "we're hiring" says you're successful and growing to VCs, potential customers, employees who might be laid off next week etc.
The place I used to work at only a few years ago rarely had an updated careers page, it took an act of congress to get something added/removed it was almost always wrong (jobs that didn't exist, that were filled, and openings that weren't listed)
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.
The year is sometimes part of the job code. There are positions listed that are multiple years old. I work for a company with such positions listed on their website.
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'll also say linkedin jobs is basically unusable.
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.
I am so glad to see someone else say this. LinkedIn jobs is utter garbage. I'll search for a particular skill keyword (a skill that I'm uniquely good at) and I'll get dozens of postings (promoted and otherwise) that have no mention of that skill at all. And a crapton of posting in other states.
No, LinkedIn jobs, I'm not interested in being an OTR driver or a sales representative. I'm a goddamn engineer.
Meanwhile I'm able to use search filters just fine in other job sites like Indeed.com.
Indeed. Fake job listings are extremely pervasive and are created for tons of reasons, like:
- 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.
Yes, it seems that since the market for print ads collapsed, the San Jose Metro (a free alt-weekly) is mainly being propped up by job ads that appear to be fake, to satisfy H1B requirements (see? we advertised this position and got no US citizen takers). There are a lot of them.
> 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.
I guess that's the way in at nVidia then, because I applied to 10+ positions that I was decidedly well-qualified for, and haven't heard anything at all in over 4 months now.
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’ve applied to 20+ nvidia sr software engineer jobs since february of last year and every single one had an internal manager referral (former colleague at another company).
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.
The solution to this is a simple state level regulation that any job posted have a unique ID, an expiry date and disposition reason. And make quarterly disposition reports available to the state. Boom !
Like how car ads at bargain prices require the vin to be shown on the ad. There really may only be one car at that price but at least this way you know it’s not completely fake.
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. :(
There are adverts for jobs and interviews rounds done to simply tick the box they have "attempted recruitment outside the company".
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.
I've had similar things happen, although I was an external candidate. But for whatever reason they needed to post the job again, have me apply again, and then I'd get hired. Which is what happened. What a weird way to start.
The main driver is not HR wanting a back-up's or the company mollifying investors but a reduction in the power of mid-level managers.
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.
Costs $millions, but is the employer assuming the employee won’t provide a BENEFIT of $millions through their labor?
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.
> But the most common type of ghost job is talent hoarding.
> “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).
Sad to see so many people getting scam these days, One of the idea I have and wish someone could take the time to implement is a self-registering platform where you can declare your information was previously stolen and used in a scam - The system will hash this information in multiple way, without storing them, such that, banks, financial institutions, or even mobilephone providers (think sim swap attack) can submit some users information and said system would come back with a result based on some matching of hashes(eg first name, dob, address or last name, dob, social security number). Ideally, it would result in the banks doing more vigorous check on user's identity like actually seeing them in person if this check fails rather than taking everything submitted over some web-form as is.
I have had family member who had their identity stolen for many years and it kept on going, it's super frustrating.
As someone who's been on Upwork as a freelancer for 10 years, I'm glad to be ahead of the curve.
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.
Job postings are mostly just fraudulent, out-of-date, or oddly over-specific and generally a waste of time for applicants who don't have an insider track through their network or a recruiter.
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).
Glad or sad to see I’m not alone. The only job I got last year was through a platform where both sides need to pay. At least there are less people screwing around
Yeah, it's well-known that people will fill out anything if they're desperate and an "authority figure" (like a potential employer) asks for it. Nobody expects to get a reply from an online job advertisement, so silently collecting information this way works, but the same format is also used for recruiting (both knowing and unknowing) middlemen for money laundering and various fraud schemes.
Over the past year or so, I’ve seen job ads on LinkedIn that have salaries well above market for specific roles. The same company is always listing different types roles (CTO, PM, etc). Definitely feels like a honeypot to harvest applicant data.
If one were in charge of feature design at a prominent job posting website, how would you brainstorm to detect ghost job listings, even if only probabilistically?
got an old college roommate in HR, now a VP of HR.
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.
I have a question for head hunters: when there's a job post that says "COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL" and nothing else, is this really a confidential search or something else?
In my experience, the 1% of the time it's not is with DoD clients, specifically with clearance jobs. If the job description does not specifically call out a security clearance level that is required, then they're just covering.
sometimes it's because they plan on firing someone once they hire a replacement, but don't want the employee being fired to see the posting and put it together that their days are numbered because they still depend on them.
Also means you'd be walking into a situation where you're taking over a role that the company critically relied on.
A lot of jobs never make it to the boards directly, or if they do, they're not listed with company names because it just opens up the position to more recruiters calling in to client managers. A recruiter will usually discuss the client with you directly so that you aren't double submitting yourself, though.
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).
When I had my first round of Vocational Rehab around 2013, I was paired with an expert coach from a specialty agency. We arranged a series of meetings at a coffeehouse; she was able to counsel me on the search, application and interview process, we honed my résumé, and she guided me through the whole process until I secured employment.
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!
While obvious it is mostly a LLM generated article, the premise is not false.
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... =)
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.