Through the pandemic, we became familiar with remote work; for some of us, we may have been familiar with the concept well before that. The possibility of working away from the office offered many benefits both personal and professional and just made sense given the roles we have.
Looking for work online and supplying documents online with digital signatures are commonplace now. No more walking into a business, asking to speak to a manager and supplying a CV printed on A4. Now you get told to apply online at www.company.com/careers where you upload your CV and it populates the relevant fields. Where often you realise the fields haven’t populated correctly so you have to edit them anyway.
You apply through Indeed, Seek, LinkedIn and directly through company websites assuming that the job ads are legitimate. That the responses you are receiving are legitimate. You assume that these job sites have done their due diligence in checking the legitimacy of the job ads being placed on their websites.
Unfortunately, what you realise is that is often not the case. You realise that an ad can seem legitimate with perfectly reasonable information and yet be completely fake. A job title, a JD, a salary, etc all seem reasonable. An individual who contacts you that seems legitimate. Yes, you checked that their name and job title are correctly spelled. The ABN is real and current. The job details are checked out. Yet you come to find out it’s all a scam.
The JD, the contract, the superannuation forms, etc all generated with AI. Hours plotting to dupe unsuspecting job seekers, minutes spent fabricating documents, and days spent chasing up these job seekers trying to make them believe that yes, they have found that next opportunity they were looking for. If you receive a contract on company letterhead, with the company’s ABN, from a company representative and need your digital signature via DocuSign you’d tend to believe it, right?
It's a global issue but I’m focusing on Australia. Where the National Anti-Scam Centre has documented an increase of 740% in job scams in 2023. Ponder this, 19.6 million AUD was stolen from job seekers with a median of 6K AUD stolen from individuals who are looking for work. Money that should have gone towards a myriad of other expenses.
No wonder people are wary. People not wanting to work? No, people are wary of being taken for a ride when they only want a fair go. No one should have to be an FBI agent to determine if a job ad is legitimate.