Spam Jobs

Looking for employment can be tedious and time consuming alone, but add the frustration of fake jobs or ‘opportunities’ and it can drive you insane. These types of jobs/opportunities are generally for positions that you have to pay a start-up fee, insurance agents, or a phony recruiter hording resumes. You’ll find these job listings all over the employment boards and if you have a resume posted on the site it’s almost certain you’ll receive a million emails soliciting a ‘great opportunity’. It’s spam at its worse!

Spam jobs prey on individuals that have a tendency to really need employment, slightly depressed, often on a tight budget, and eager to start working again.

Who are the driving force behind these spam jobs? They’re recruiters or temp agencies hording resumes trying to boost their databases, they’re scammers collecting your personal information (social security, address, and more), pyramid schemes promising large amounts of income, or other counterfeit operations.

Unfortunately there isn’t much you can do to avoid receiving these emails or fake calls, and sometimes it can be hard to identify a fake job. However there are some things you can do to bypass getting duped. These are based on personal experience and are more of suggested guidelines or warning signs that you might need to proceed with caution:

• A recruiter is overly excited about talking to you about a “great opportunity that matches your skills”, but is vague about the job opportunity.
• Recruiter asks for personal information (such as social security number, bank routing number for direct deposit, or indirectly asking about your appearances…eye color, etc.
• High salary, but little, if any, explanation of the actual job.
• Be weary if the company is listed as “confidential”
• Avoid the insurance agent scams like the plague!!
• Look at what time the email was sent...chances are HR isn't sending you emails at 5:30am.

Job hunters beware these scammers are getting smarter and better at disguising their true intent. However here are some web sites that will help you avoid any unfortunate search disasters:

• http://help.monster.com/besafe/
• http://www.careerbuilder.com/JobSeeker/Info/Fraud.aspx
• www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs25a-JobSeekerPriv2.htm
• http://jobsearchtech.about.com/library/weekly/aa042103.htm
  
  

Personalizing the Job Hunt

Finding a job can be a full-time job for most, but arming yourself with the right tools and applying technology can ease the process. Often you can save time by streamlining your search simply by establishing an online hub that channels several of your favorite sites or links in one central location. For those with their own websites and HTML/RSS knowledge this is easy way to minimize your search efforts. You can also use Yahoo!, Google or even MSN to building your personalized job hunt page.

On my personal page (as shown) I have 2-3 RSS feeds, several employment search and information sites, personal links to my email, and miscellaneous links that I always visit.

myFavicon

I’m so excited I learned how to add a Favicon (sounds like some kind of Transformer) to the browser when people visit my site(s). Check out the new Favicon at the top of your browser next (first) time you visit http://www.employtroy.com/