Last week I saw a job posting that had some really interesting advice that I don’t remember seeing before, at least not in a job posting. It said:

For your privacy and protection, when applying to a job online: Never provide credit card or bank account information, or perform any sort of monetary transaction.

What great advice.

It would probably help solve the issue that I’ve been seeing recently, namely the numerous emails I get from people regarding a certain (fake) oil company that emails people expressing interest in the person even though the recipient of the email never applied to the job or company in the first place. It’s obviously a scam but people keep emailing me asking if it’s a real job and real company and what they should do.

Notwithstanding the fact that this email has all the hallmarks of a fake, phony company and a scam i.e. spelling and grammatical errors in the email, a free email address is used (like an oil company can’t afford a real email address with their company name in it?!), and the fact that in the email they tend to ask for a job visa processing charge or something like that.

Also notwithstanding the fact that the people who have received the email never applied to the company in the first place! Like legitimate companies just happen to come across your email address and offer you a job sight unseen with no interview! Yet people fall for this scam and I see lots of people emailing me honestly wondering if it’s a real company.

Bottom line: when you see anyone asking you online for money or any sort of fee during a job interview process, be very careful. Legitimate companies don’t do this in my experience.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve received a number of emails regarding fake job offers and other job search scams that abound on the Internet these days.

Several guys from India emailed me regarding emails they’d received – independently of each other – where a company they’d never applied to had offered them a job or interview and they weren’t sure what to do about it.

Certainly, getting an unsolicited email from a company you’ve never applied to seems to good to be true (and it usually is) but when you’re looking for a job, sometimes any news is good news and perhaps their heart was telling them to go for it even if their head was telling them to delete the email and forget about it.

The thing that these fake job offers all had in common was that they were all sent to people in one country offering them a job in another country. Certainly if you’re in another country it can be difficult to quickly determine if a particular foreign country really exists or not.

Having said that there are many resources on the Internet alone that can help. Doing a quick Google search on the name of the company that was offering the alleged job quickly told me it was a scam so I passed this info onto the disappointed guys who’d emailed me regarding the company.

How can you tell which emails and correspondence is real and fake these days?

First off, common sense has to prevail. Companies you’ve never applied to don’t suddenly email you with a job offer or interview! It simply doesn’t work that way in life.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself to avoid getting sucked in by a scam:

1. Is the company contacting you asking for money for any reason? This is a simple, first sign of a scam. If they’re asking for money, bank account info, etc this is obviously a scam.

2. Does the company have a website and legitimate contact info? Or do they simply send you an email with no contact info and a PO box instead of a real address? They probably won’t include a phone number otherwise you could call them and see if anyone answers. Mind you even if someone does answer and pretends to be from the company in question, it still doesn’t mean it isn’t a scam!

3. When you Google search the company name, what do you find? Often, this will immediately give you the answer you’re looking for. In the case of the company that I was asked about above by the Indian job searchers, when I Googled the company name, the first search result was a Yahoo! Answers result where someone who had also been contacted by this company asked “is this a real job” and a poster from the UK where the company was allegedly located said “no, it’s a popular scam in the UK.”

Life is hard enough without convincing yourself that nameless, faceless people are going to email you out of the blue offering you a job you’ve never applied for. Putting your faith, time, effort and money into situations like this will only serve to waste your time and money and lead to disappointment.

Today I received an email from a job searcher asking me about an email he’d received from an oil company that was indicating that they were interested to interview him and he wasn’t sure what to do. It was a bit difficult to make out exactly what the person was asking for because English wasn’t his first language but it seemed to me that he was trying to tell me that he was a bit worried about what he’d received.

I wanted to be sure I knew what he was asking so I figured the first thing I’d do is Google search the company that he referred to and that he’d suggested was interested to interview him. After typing the exact company name he quoted into Google and clicking the search button, the first thing I noticed was that quickly scanning the results section didn’t reveal any website incorporating the company name ie. the company’s name didn’t show up in the natural search results section even though I had typed the company name word for word.

This indicates to me immediately that they either don’t have a website – which is odd for any decent sized company and even a small company these days! – so I was already skeptical as to what I’d found.

I checked the first search result for the company name which produced a result seemingly indicating that the company had a job listing searching for new staff members so I clicked the link and it took me to a job search website that stated that the page didn’t exist anymore. That’s kind of odd as typically pages would get removed from the index if they no longer exist but stuff like this happens so I figured I’d go to the next search result and check that one out.

I then looked at the second search result and noticed that someone had submitted a question to Yahoo! Answers where they mentioned that they’d also received an email from this same company offering a job interview and they were asking if it was a scam. Someone had responded that indeed it was a well-known scam in the UK and that they should ignore the email.

So, the first two Google results for the company name don’t produce a link to the company’s website – which I couldn’t find anywhere on the first results page – but instead produce a job search listing that doesn’t exist followed by a question and answer from Yahoo! users stating that the company doesn’t exist and that the email was a scam.

That’s good enough for me!

Unfortunately, the job searcher who emailed me wasn’t able to tell me exactly about the situation – he didn’t mention if he’d applied to the job on his own or if he received an email out of the blue from this “company” suggesting that they wanted to interview him for a job he hadn’t actually applied for – but I’m guessing it’s the latter. Companies typically don’t email you offering you an interview when you haven’t previously applied to them! That’s just too good to be true or perhaps wishful thinking on the part of the job searcher.

The fact that the job searcher lives in India and the “company” was claiming to be in another country (the UK) should have been another hint!

Moral of the story: As we’ve spoken about scams abound so you need to watch out and ensure that you don’t fall for any of them. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

And if you’re getting unsolicited emails from people wanting to interview you for a job you haven’t applied for, that’s tends to scream scam.

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.

The worst career decision I made was about 10 years ago when I was in the process of starting to look for a new job, had convinced myself that I needed a career change, and was also convinced I didn’t know what to do next in my career and could use some professional help. This was a few years before I got into recruitment incidentally.

The worst career decision I made was to fork over a few thousand dollars to a well-known and well-established “career counseling” firm who have been around for decades and who used to advertise in the newspaper classifieds. This was where I first heard about them. I don’t even think they’re in business anymore although they may have just changed their name and rebranded.

They used a very old school hard sell approach with a breathtaking inability to actually deliver what they promised once you had signed up. They constantly spoke about the so-called “hidden job market” and although they convinced me that they would help me locate said hidden job market, it appeared that these jobs were so well hidden that even this firm couldn’t find any.

This company in a word was a joke. The office that I signed up with has since changed affiliations and now carries a different name than the one they used when I was a client. Clearly I wasn’t the only one who found them useless because they have since been investigated and referred to in various print and tv exposes.

They assigned a counselor to me, a nice guy who was otherwise not helpful other than being a guy I could discuss stuff with. I ran various things past him regarding my career but as I always scheduled my meetings with him at the end of the day, our meetings always had to occur in a way so he wouldn’t miss the first train home. Nice customer service.

Last month I made reference to the crappy resume that this company wrote for me. I stopped using the resume they created for me right away because even I could figure out it looked like crap.

Beyond that, there really wasn’t a lot offered in the way of help or advice. Their systems and processes were literally decades old and so outdated that it wasn’t even funny.

When I first started working with this company, I actually thought they’d be able to help me and I didn’t believe much of the sales hype I was told so I did go in with both eyes open.

I had decided to go with them because I felt I needed a kick in the pants to get my career moving in the right direction. Instead the only thing that got a kick was my bank account.

I just read an online newspaper article that referred to how the area I live in will start cracking down on fake career colleges that charge students thousands of dollars and then deliver phony and in some cases virtually non-existent educations.

The article gave an instance where the newspaper who conducted the investigation had several of their reporters sign up with several of these schools and showed how one received a certification as a support worker after only two weeks of “classes” which basically involved watching DVDs and reading Wikipedia (!) handouts. The other reports posing as a student got one day of training and a certification to work as a security guard.

Fake colleges and universities are nothing new but they continue to exist and continue to charge people money – often thousands of dollars – for fake and phony degrees of certifications.

I worked for a computer training company earlier in my career and we found ourselves often competing with fly-by-night training companies that offered a cheap version of what we were offering and at the time I was working in this industry, we experience several of our “competitors” going out of business and in some cases their former students ended up coming to our company to continue their training.

Typically, they’d tell us about how they’d paid as much if not more money to these now defunct businesses and how they got an inferior product in return. We heard stories about the certifications that they were promised and when we saw the curriculum, we realized it was a joke and nothing to be taken seriously. Unfortunately these poor people had spend time and money and had wasted both.

When searching for education options, I’d stick with legitimate organizations and avoid the fly-by-night ones and ones that give you a bad impression. Often you can visit their website and visit their office in person to get a sense as to what sort of organization you’re dealing with. The computer training company I worked for encouraged people to visit our office and look around the training areas. We also offered people the opportunity to take a $259 class for free to experience things for themselves. We could offer up references that potential students could call themselves, too.

If the school you’re considering won’t do all of this for you before you sign up with them and fork over your money, I’d think twice about investing anything with them.

Mind you, even this doesn’t guarantee anything…the computer training company I worked for ended up filing for bankruptcy 1.5 years after I started with them just as the job was starting to go well for me!

In this case, many people ended up losing money on training that they’d prepaid for, so be careful when you’re prepaying for training that will be offered over a long period of time. Times are tough and even well-established companies are closing.

The only students that had any sort of recourse (I suspect) were those who paid by credit card and might have the opportunity to charge back or at least dispute the charge after the company went out of business since they’d paid for a service that hadn’t been delivered.

I recently signed up for a free newsletter for a resume writing service whose website I had visited.

In the first newsletter I received, I was surprised that it contained two “great methods” (in the words of the person writing the newsletter) to use during the job search process.

The first method suggested paying a small fee – someone has to make money on this, right? – and having your resume posted instantly on over 90 career sites including many of the big job boards we’ve all heard of plus a bunch of other ones too.

Slapping your resume up on numerous job boards doesn’t accomplish much since everyone can do the same thing just as easily. If anything it makes these job boards even more of a waste of time since it makes it harder for hiring managers to effectively search them. When recruiters see your resume posted on many different job boards, they start wondering why you can’t find a job. Hiring managers probably do the same.

The second suggested job search method involved paying another small fee to have your resume sent out to a “ton of recruiters.” I’m not sure how many recruiters constitute one ton although I guess the old adage of “if you throw enough you-know-what against a wall, something is bound to stick” is the goal here.

I used to work for a recruitment company that signed up for a free trial for one of these resume blasting services. At least by offering the service for free, the resume blasting service had found their optimal price point I guess. The resumes we were sent ended up in the Deleted folder quite quickly without even being read. We were bombarded by resumes from people from all over North America and simply couldn’t be bothered to read them. I suspect many job searchers who pay for this sort of service are legitimately surprised when they don’t get a single response from any one of the people who receive their resume.

I guess it goes to show you that some people should stick to what they know and if it’s writing resumes, then they shouldn’t stray into the field of job searching and career management. If they knew anything about either of these subjects, they’d know that plastering your resume on every job search board and/or firing your resume off to hundreds of recruiters is not only a waste of time, but a good way to devalue your resume and ultimately your own worth.

Plus, you completely lose control of your resume and control over the number of people who know you’re actively looking for a new job. This is especially important if you’re working at the time. Who knows who might get hold of your resume from one of those resume blasting services…your current boss for example?

I just received maybe the best spam email ever. The subject line said “***SPAM*** Please respond.”

I didn’t bite.

My ISP doesn’t actually flag stuff as spam in the subject line, it just puts it into the junk folder which is where I found this email. Maybe this is a spammer who admits what they are and just wants to be honest about it.

I still receive some Nigerian scam emails and I know that some people still fall for them unfortunately. I also recently received a spam email that appears to suggest that the person sending the email is a troop serving in Iraq which is interesting considering that it was sent by an email address in China.

It goes to show you that some people are unethical. Lazy, too.

During your career, you’ll run into unethical and lazy people that you’ll have to deal with. Recruiters, HR staff, managers, subordinates, colleagues, company owners. Maybe the entire company.

My first experience dealing with lazy people (when it became really noticeable anyways) was in university during several group projects where I was working alongside 4-5 other people. Typically, I found that 2-3 people in the group were motivated and 1-2 other people in the group were less motivated but were good people otherwise. Finally, there was the inevitable lazy SOB who just didn’t care and whose goal was to do as little work as possible but still get credit.

At this point, I figured lazy people would have been weeded out and that they wouldn’t bother paying money out of their own pocket to attend school if they didn’t really want to be there.

Clearly I was wrong. Once I got to university, I experienced a different kind of lazy people, that’s all.

At work, you’ll inevitably face it from time to time, too. The question is, how to deal with it?

The best way to remain employed is to show value. Make it obvious how you add revenue to the company, save the company money or ideally do both.

Similarly, subtly make it obvious to others in your company about the things you’ve done and the things you’ve accomplished. Sooner or later the lazy one will get noticed by others and not for the right reasons. As soon as people you work with know the things you’ve accomplished, you’ll get noticed for the right reasons.