Popular job search and career scams

If you surf the Internet enough, you’ve undoubtedly run into numerous products and services making various claims regarding how they will improve your job search and career. In the old days before the Internet, these scams and crummy products and services would have been advertised in the newspapers but like the Nigerian email scam, the Internet has made it cheaper to promote this crud online.

In fact some of the scams utilize the Internet to actually offer the product or service itself.

Here are some popular career and job search scams you may have already come across and why you should avoid them:

1. Career management services: These old-style services will usually require you to pay thousands of dollars up front in exchange for promising to do all sorts of things like rewrite your resume, tap the “hidden” job market for you, market your resume to their clients and ultimately help you get a better job and improve your career. Do a Google search for “Bernard Haldane and Associates” to see what I mean.

2. Email scams: I’ve experienced this myself, where I receive a generic email from someone saying they saw my resume online and ask for an updated copy of my resume so they can discuss specific opportunities with me. In this case, I didn’t even have a resume online at the time so it’s hard to say where they got my email address from. Often they’ll try to get you to fill out a contact form that might include personal information so in regard, many of these scams are phishing scams. In other cases, it might just be a recruiter trying to get your resume for either legitimate or illegitimate reasons.

3. “Recruitment” firms that want you to pay them to help you find a job: In North America and in most places I’m aware of, using a recruiter means that the hiring company pays them, not the job searcher. Just like the person selling a house pays the real estate agent and not the person buying the house, it’s not common to pay someone to help you find a job. That’s not how it works. In my experience, the people that do this sort of thing often prey on recent immigrants and in many cases, they are from the same home country as the job searcher and try to convince the job searcher that paying them to help the person find a job is “how things are done” in the country. It’s not.

4. Resume blasting and faxing services: This isn’t so much a scam as it is a complete waste of time and money. This is where you pay a company to mass email or fax your resume to hundreds (or more) of hiring managers and recruiters. The old adage of “if you throw enough you-know-what against a wall, something is bound to stick.” Blasting your resume out to hundreds of nameless, faceless people and hoping to find a new job this way is like randomly dialing phone numbers looking for a date.

5. Working from home scams: You could write a book on these scams…from the stuffing envelopes scam of the 1970s to more recent scams involving getting paid to read emails or clicking on ads for cash, understand that while working from can be a legitimate exercise, many of the work from home ads you see online and in newspapers are simply scams. The old adage applies: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

5. Education and training scams: From resume mills pumping out fake degrees to phony online training and certifications, you really need to be careful not to pay out money to get an unimpressive diploma or degree in response. As a recruiter, I can assure you that reading a resume that contains a reference to a “degree” from some school called “University-of-Some-City-I’ve-Never-Heard-Of” doesn’t impress anyone reading your resume nor does it help you get a new job.

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