Try not to get scammed while looking for work

121 points by trysound a day ago on lobsters | 22 comments

mrunix | a day ago

The economy is so bad scammers went from offering people money to offering jobs

gerikson | a day ago

In all the situations like this I have read about, the point is to get access to the jobseeker's machine to attempt to drain their cryptocurrency accounts.

There’s also basic info stealing angle i.e., access bank accounts, passwords, leverage contacts for phishing etc.

pyj | a day ago

frustration clouds judgment

It's easy to be desperate when you're trying to get a job. You want to be accommodating to get or keep your foot in the door when you've been putting in dozens or hundreds of resumes with no response.

Between Calendly links, companies not running their own job boards (e.g. greenhouse), Zoom, Teams, online assessments, and background checks it's hard to know who and what to trust.

sjamaan | a day ago

The variation here is that they phished themselves some access to the actual company's LinkedIn account, adding legitimacy to the meeting request. I can't imagine how it must be for a job seeker to be in such a situation, but damn...

[OP] trysound | a day ago

Comment removed by author

[OP] trysound | 21 hours ago

Just remembered one thing. Before the first call Joan asked me to postpone for 2 hours due to family emergency. This is another trick to make me relate to him and loose my guard even more.

Added to the article.

whjms | 20 hours ago

That's sad. That reminds me of common scams where the scammer says they're someone starving or locked out of their bank account, they need help etc. They prey on good people :(

gnunicorn | 19 hours ago

side note for people looking: also don't fall for any of these "AI recruiting companies", like Mercor, who pretend to have plenty of open positions but just want you to use their AI recruiting tools to train it. There is no actually paid jobs behind them. Don't fall for it.

sjamaan | 5 hours ago

That's fucking evil

jfloren | 20 hours ago

This is the reality we live in. Recruiters filter candidates through opaque ATS systems to analyze practically hand-written resumes, and result may vary across different tools. You cannot be sure which traits will be considered and which just ignored by their system.

Practically hand-written? In my experience hiring the last few months, 90% of resumes are clearly generated via LLM. I treasure the ones that buck the trend.

Hiring is really, really bad right now from both sides. We're trying in-person job fairs at this point.

dubiouslittlecreature | 15 hours ago

Practically hand-written? In my experience hiring the last few months, 90% of resumes are clearly generated via LLM. I treasure the ones that buck the trend. Hiring is really, really bad right now from both sides. We're trying in-person job fairs at this point.

I’m not going to lie, I think that’s mostly on y’all (hiring managers/specialists).

You choose the venue and determine almost every aspect of the process for candidates.

I don’t and will never AI-generate anything, but it’s not like putting in human effort to write my resume has borne any fruit for me, it’s just the cost of entry.

mcherm | 12 hours ago

The problem is that YOU (and probably most people) may never AI-generate your resume or application, but still 90% of the resumes received are AI generated.

dubiouslittlecreature | 12 hours ago

My point is that the structure of the whole interaction is dictated by the recruiters and it’s mostly their fault it sucks for everyone involved

gnyeki | 12 hours ago

What could a recruiter do to disincentivize generative AI use in job applications? I’m curious what you mean by venue and what aspects of the process you have in mind changing to achieve this.

dubiouslittlecreature | 10 hours ago

I don't know. Basically the entire process is in their control though, so I'm not that sympathetic.

The person I replied to did mention job fairs though

jfloren | 9 hours ago

All we can really do is put a thing on a website that says "pls send resume". I'm not sure what else we can really do to hire online... I don't feel like we have a lot of control in whether we get a flood of AI bullshit resumes or not. We do control whether or not we use automated prescreening: we don't, and it costs many hours of manual screening.

But I'm just an engineer who's been with the company long enough that I help do hiring. Maybe there's some cool ideas out there I'm not aware of... but the best I've been able to come up with is going to in-person events where the applicant hands the same resume to every company.

dubiouslittlecreature | 5 hours ago

In person job fairs do seem like an improvement at least.

sjamaan | 5 hours ago

I'm not sure what else we can really do to hire online...

Be active in technical communities, specifically those around the tech you use. Then if there's a job opening, mention it there (or better yet, if you are in direct contact with some good people, ask them if they are interested)

bsder | 10 hours ago

We're trying in-person job fairs at this point.

Hallelujah! About fscking time!

I don't understand the level of resistance to in-person recruiting at the same time as Return To Office mandates are being thrown down from on high.

jfloren | 9 hours ago

One great thing about being a remote company is that we have people all over, we can do in-person recruiting at many different venues without even doing travel.

e3bc54b2 | 3 hours ago

I don't understand the level of resistance to in-person recruiting at the same time as Return To Office mandates

In-person interviews limit both companies and candidates to those in the vicinity.

It also limits companies to candidates who can take half day off of work to get to your office and interview because guess what, your interviewers refuse to do that outside working ours.

My last company mandated in-person interviews and every single candidate that bothered to show up was either doing nothing at theit org or laid off (almost always because they were doing nothing).

In my experience, good cnadidates also like to have their calendar populated and simpky refuse to get to office (unless it is final talk or something), mostly because they are not desperate for an interview.

[OP] trysound | 19 hours ago

This is an exaggeration, but nonetheless an LLM does not help to get a job.