Via C&EN and ACS Careers, a depressingly on-topic article:
The job market is a strange place right now: low hire rates, low turnover, artificial intelligence, global instability, and other factors have combined to make it difficult for job seekers (and even for employers). In addition, the number and type of scams are increasing at an alarming rate. Job seekers can get desperate, leading them to be not as careful as they should be, sometimes with unfortunate results.
The article goes onto describe a couple of the classic ones, including paying in advance and also fake recruiters. I sure get a lot of fake recruiters on LinkedIn, telling them my extraordinarily boring LinkedIn page makes them really interested in my background. I am not exactly the world's biggest fan of regulation, but I think that it's time for Congress to get involved.
be very careful about any approaches and job offers and cold pitches on LinkedIn - or even Twitter, Reddit etc. Too many scammers impersonating someone, and poorly qualified shady recruitment agents working on commission by unethical methods (=careless how many people they have to pitch and how many get screwed as long as they earn their commission). Then you have "synthetic" fake personalities that do not exist, but the profiles are getting better and more convincing thanks to AI. For scammers, even 0.2% success rate of their scams is enough since many of these things can be automated
ReplyDeleteI get a lot of consulting inquiries that I'm pretty sure are scams. I can often tell because the inquiry is asking me to consult on some subfield that I'm not very knowledgeable about. I'm not well-known enough to get legitimate consulting inquiries, so I'm immediately suspicious of these emails.
ReplyDeleteI'm seeing less of the other kind of problem in recent years: legitimate but crappy recruiters from Yoh, Kelly, Aerotek, etc wasting my time with spam calls about entry-level jobs that would set my career back 20 years.