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.

Hiding behind email is something that is fairly easy to do and is something I have to watch out myself as I’m prone to doing it from time to time.

Sending an email rather than picking up the phone and calling someone or seeing them in person is an easy way to get a message out…but whether or not the person receiving the email – assuming the email got delivered to their In box and not their Deleted folder – is another question.

As a recruiter, I know it’s easy to send an email rather than picking up the phone and calling someone but again, it’s so easy to send an email and just as easy to ignore it. Plus you’re basically putting your fate in their hands as you wait for them (to hopefully) respond quickly.

Just as we spoke about yesterday regarding how working for someone puts your fate in the hands of others, so does hiding behind email when you know in your heart and head that picking up the phone or seeing someone in person will possibly get you closer to what you’re looking for.

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.

The rule of the day relates to how sarcasm should have its own font just so it’s perfectly clear that the person writing the sarcasm is actually being sarcastic.

Have you ever read an email (or a newspaper article, Internet article, magazine article, etc) and wondered if the person writing it was being serious or sarcastic?

I’ve read plenty of emails from people who I don’t yet know very well who try for some reason to make a joke and sometimes I can’t tell whether or not they’re actually joking or serious. Sarcasm only works when it’s obvious and when it’s applicable to the situation.

Sometimes it’s difficult to convey sarcasm unless you put an annoying smiley face after every incident just to make it patently obvious to readers that sarcasm was intended.

Moral of the story: Watch what you write and how you write it whether in a work setting or when applying for jobs. Sometimes people try to get a bit too cute and make a joke and might not realize that the person at the other end actually reading it might not get the joke.

Or worse, they take the comment the wrong way and you pay for it as a result.

As we’ve already discussed, many people these days consider a “job search” to be a matter of firing off dozens of resumes in response to jobs that they’ve seen online on various job boards. The issue of course is that it’s just as easy for everyone else to do the same thing so ultimately, the hiring manager receiving these emails might simply choose to ignore the (possibly) hundreds of submissions they get and look for a more effective way to hire someone.

In other words, if you email your resume to someone, does someone actually read it?

With spam filters these days, they might not even receive it.

In the old days – that would be up to the early to late 1990s – it wasn’t uncommon to mail or fax your resume to a hiring manager and then receive a letter in the mail several weeks later in response to acknowledge that they’d received your application!

You’d actually get a written response and not an automatic form email as is common these days. It felt like you were actually dealing with a human being at the other end.

It didn’t mean you were getting the job or even an interview but it did somehow feel you had made some progress. Now of course, it takes far less time and effort to email a resume than it did to print out, address, stamp and then mail a resume to the same person.

Of course, this also means that you may not have to worry about all the stuff we used to worry about when mailing a resume:

• Should I use colored or white paper?
• Should I use heavy stock paper or can I use the cheaper stuff?
• Should I hand write or type the address on the envelope?
• Should I include a cover letter?

These days, things tend to be spelled out a bit more than before. Jobs that you view online often tell you exactly what you need to apply for the job and many companies utilize online systems that enable them to decide what they want from you ie. Resume? Cover letter? Written answers to certain questions?

In that regard, when applying for jobs, the best thing to do is to follow the instructions you are given and give them what they’re asking for. Even if they don’t specifically ask for a cover letter, you can include one to not only give them a sample of your writing but more importantly to illustrate things not evident in your resume that show the reader why you are someone they need to interview. As a recruiter, I often speed read cover letters just to see what’s in there and to check the spelling, grammar, etc which can give me an idea as to the type of person I’m dealing with.