How much is “free” worth?
This past week, I received several spam emails offering me free items that I knew were fake so I simply deleted the emails. You’ve probably received the same.
You’ve probably also received emails or seen offers for legitimate free things related to your career and wondered about the value.
Free resume critiques
Free job boards
Free answers to interview questions.
How much are these things worth? It certainly depends on who is providing the free things of course and they certainly might have some value (although in these cases the person offering the freebies is probably doing so to sell you something down the line.)
I also received another email this week which was rather bizarre. It came from a legitimate email address -or at least it looked like it came from one – and was a full letter signed by an HR rep (or at least he was claiming to be one) offering me a sales job and offering to pay me a number of things in exchange for working as a contractor.
The interesting thing about this email was that it didn’t really take the typical Nigerian scam email tone where it just looks fake from a mile away. This one looked quite legit…or course the “To” field of the email was blank meaning that this email had been fired off to perhaps hundreds or thousands of other people, but I digress.
The reason that I mention it is that several days earlier, I received an email from a fellow in India who said he’d been sent an email from a company in the UK wanting to interview him…even though he’d never applied for a job with the company.
Just like I hadn’t applied to the company I received the email from either.
He was pretty excited for the interview…he was just trying to figure out why he was getting the offer since he hadn’t even applied to the company in question.
Moral of the story: As usual, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
