Avoiding an Online Job Scam

On Ars Technica, Lee H. Goldberg, an unemployed writer and editor, writes about how he almost got caught in an online job hiring scam. Fortunately, he realized that something was amiss before the scammers could do him any damage. But it's obvious that someone more desperate or less careful than he was could easily have become a victim.

This is how it started:

Like most successful cons, this one involved gaining the willing consent of its victim through some combination of greed, fear, or desperation. Having been laid off several months earlier, I fell into the latter category and was ripe for the picking. When I lost the unfulfilling but steady editorial job I'd held down for the past few years, I was confident that my strong credentials and deep collection of contacts I'd made over the years would help me land a better gig within a month or two.

To my surprise, the job hunting skills I'd honed over my 20+ year career were outdated and almost useless at penetrating the layers of digital screening agents that stood between me and a potential employer. I found myself in unfamiliar territory, struggling to learn the complex Kabuki dance that today's job seekers must master in order to slip past Corporate HR's silicon sentinels and gain an audience with a carbon-based life form.

Even engaging a resume coach to help me finetune my credentials failed to break the deafening silence until an email arrived from ZipRecruiter, one of several job hunting sites I was registered with. The recruiter was responding to the application I had submitted a day earlier for a remote-work tech writer position at a biotech firm.

The article is worth reading if you're involved in the online job market and there are links to resources that offer advice on avoiding scams. It's certainly opened my eyes.