I received a newsletter from Jobs.co.za this morning, and read an article linked from it called “Beware of Job scams“.
This seems to be a big problem all over the South African internet, and I know the Dealfish team use human moderators to delete thousands of scammy posts every day. I assume the same is true for Gumtree and all the others, and Careers24 is not immune from scammers either and we’re forced to keep an eye out for their appearance.
The bit that made me laugh was this line from the article:
Jobs.co.za explains that the most typical strategy used by scammers to trap Job Seekers is by posting job advertisements on websites or in the newspaper requesting CV’s to be sent.
Unfortunately, this strategy is also employed far too often by recruitment agencies, the legitimate customers of the job boards!
Some unscrupulous recruiters will load up fake jobs so they can harvest CVs for a particular industry and then contact the job seekers later with other real jobs that might not be as interesting as the fake one they have posted. Similarly, a some recruiters will load a fairly generic job ad and then repost it again and again, sometimes for years! Many of these ads link straight out to the recruiters own website for CV upload, meaning that the job board that carried the ad doesn’t get to build their user database either.
This practice is not unique to South African recruiters, nor is it limited to the recruitment industry, and it’s not uncommon for real estate agents to list houses that have already been sold so that they can do the same bait and switch – “oh, sorry, that one has just been sold, but I have another house that has just come onto the market that you should see”.
There is a growing backlash against this practice, and there are some job boards emerging to fill the gap that offer a “no recruitment agency” policy, insisting on direct employer ads only. This obviously hurts the industry as a whole, and it’s grossly unfair to the ethical recruiters and job boards who choose not to engage in this sort of policy.
One of the first pieces of advice I was given by someone previously in the industry when I joined Careers24 was to do exactly this – post my own fake job ads to grow the CV database.
I don’t think this is ethical behaviour, and I won’t be engaging in the same scam that the real criminals are trying on the job boards.
And over time I’d like to build the reputation of Careers24 for listing great jobs that really exist.
I encourage recruitment agencies to take a stand, stop taking advantage of people looking for work, and to serve the South African job-seeking market better:
- List real jobs! it’s that simple – if you want to build a great relationship with your candidates and place them again and again, don’t start out by lying to them
- Don’t create a spruced up version of a hard-to-fill job so you can do a bait-and-switch on suitable candidates
- Don’t keep refreshing generic job ads for developers or admin people so you can collect CVs from the job board and keep them in your own systems
- Do let the applicant know who you are recruiting for if at all possible – job seekers love responding to direct ads
- Don’t repost the same ad multiple times with different keywords and under different names – you’re wasting everyone’s time if the candidates write up multiple intro letters and tweak their CVs for the posts that are all for the same job
And if you do need to post an ad for a position or skills need that you think is coming up but doesn’t exist yet, please mark it as a “sourcing ad”, or “future hiring” so that candidates know exactly what they are responding to.
What do you think? Ever been stung by a fake ad or an unscrupulous job board?
Related posts:
- Career move… to Careers24
Recruiter or scammer?
I received a newsletter from Jobs.co.za this morning, and read an article linked from it called “Beware of Job scams“.
This seems to be a big problem all over the South African internet, and I know the Dealfish team use human moderators to delete thousands of scammy posts every day. I assume the same is true for Gumtree and all the others, and Careers24 is not immune from scammers either and we’re forced to keep an eye out for their appearance.
The bit that made me laugh was this line from the article:
Unfortunately, this strategy is also employed far too often by recruitment agencies, the legitimate customers of the job boards!
Some unscrupulous recruiters will load up fake jobs so they can harvest CVs for a particular industry and then contact the job seekers later with other real jobs that might not be as interesting as the fake one they have posted. Similarly, a some recruiters will load a fairly generic job ad and then repost it again and again, sometimes for years! Many of these ads link straight out to the recruiters own website for CV upload, meaning that the job board that carried the ad doesn’t get to build their user database either.
This practice is not unique to South African recruiters, nor is it limited to the recruitment industry, and it’s not uncommon for real estate agents to list houses that have already been sold so that they can do the same bait and switch – “oh, sorry, that one has just been sold, but I have another house that has just come onto the market that you should see”.
There is a growing backlash against this practice, and there are some job boards emerging to fill the gap that offer a “no recruitment agency” policy, insisting on direct employer ads only. This obviously hurts the industry as a whole, and it’s grossly unfair to the ethical recruiters and job boards who choose not to engage in this sort of policy.
One of the first pieces of advice I was given by someone previously in the industry when I joined Careers24 was to do exactly this – post my own fake job ads to grow the CV database.
I don’t think this is ethical behaviour, and I won’t be engaging in the same scam that the real criminals are trying on the job boards.
And over time I’d like to build the reputation of Careers24 for listing great jobs that really exist.
I encourage recruitment agencies to take a stand, stop taking advantage of people looking for work, and to serve the South African job-seeking market better:
And if you do need to post an ad for a position or skills need that you think is coming up but doesn’t exist yet, please mark it as a “sourcing ad”, or “future hiring” so that candidates know exactly what they are responding to.
What do you think? Ever been stung by a fake ad or an unscrupulous job board?
Related posts:
from → Industry comment