Something else to be aware of is compromised LinkedIn profiles. I was recently contacted by a very real looking profile on LinkedIn, who was supposedly recruiting for a very real position at a very real company that the profile actually worked for. Red flags were:

1. Bad english/spelling in messages
2. Compensation a little too good to be true
3. Sounded too easy to 'get' the job
4. Person's job title had nothing to do with recruitment until very recently
5. 'Application form' they sent me looked a little bogus

They wanted me to fill out a form with all my info., including SSN, and send photocopies of my ID. When I asked for an email address at the company in question to send everything to, they ghosted me.

Yikes, that one almost got me. Advice here is to always manually 'two factor' identify people who contact you out of the blue.

Safe hunting folks.

I always check if the job offer is also on the companies website

Any “job” that requires you to pay anything up front is a scam. Period.

The internet as a whole is just absolutely overrun with bots and scammy bullshit. It's gotten way out of hand and AI is only making it worse.

I've gotten a few jobs via indeed, real businesses still use it, but it's so chock full of scams and fake listings that I do things the old fashioned way now. Call up the company you want to work for, ask for their HR department if they have one, ask for the head of the department you want to work for if they don't, talk to the person for 2 minutes about who you are and what you do, don't be a dingus, ask for a direct email to submit your resumé and cover letter. I always get a callback doing this method.

Back when I was in my first year of uni, I applied for a part-time job on indeed. Found out it was a scam when they wanted to pre-pay me with a too-big check and have me transfer the difference to some other account. I noped right out of there.

For those who might be unaware, the scam is they send you a fraudulent check, but it might take a few days to be discovered as such by your bank. But in the meantime, the amount shows up in your account and you transfer the money they tell you to (which is a legitimate transfer). Then, when the bank discovers the check was fraudulent, they remove the amount from your account, but you're left high and dry because you can't undo the transfer because the transfer you did was legit.

I can’t wait to retire and fuck off.

I went through this process once.

Submitted my details, they contacted me to set up an “interview” over telegram (a program I didn’t have and downloaded just to see what would happen, I knew it was a scam by that point)

So I went into it, they ask some generic questions they don’t take enough time to read (and filling them with nonsense doesn’t matter) and at the end they ask for a photocopy of your id and social security card (much like a real job, which is a problem in and of itself) and send to some shady email created with that company name @hotmail or some shit.

The company itself was real, the job posting was real, but the job posting was 3 years old, and I had to call the company to verify it wasn’t theirs. I also provided them with the posting link so they could follow up with indeed if they wanted to.

It’s not very elegant, but I guess desperate people don’t really do to much thinking about it..

During my most recent job search, the most annoying thing I saw was "resume consultants"

They'd reach out like an interested recruiter, but very quickly get to the sales pitch

I think all states have state agencies with their own job postings that have been better vetted than those on sites like Indeed or Monster. It works a little bit differently in each state, but you should be able to find information about job service offices in your state with contact information so you can ask about the details.

You still have to be somewhat wary of scams because some can slip through, but I believe there is a verification process for the job postings in these databases.

What's the best place to look for jobs these days? Going on indeed floods me with endless "insurance sales" positions. I tried Dice, but almost every job is wildly out of range for experience to pay. I've devolved down to scrolling over an area on google maps and clicking businesses to check their websites.

Indeed has always sucked anyway

This is literally what public/private key signing was invented for.

The person affiliated with the company signs their posting/emails with their private key, and the company maintains a list of all public keys corresponding to anyone working for them. That way, anyone outside the company who is allegedly talking to someone from a certain company can validate the signature against the public key to ensure it came from who they say they are.

So many "sales" places reached out to me while I was job hunting, my god

Clear scam mills designed to make you data harvest on people by canvasing door to door and if you fail to make a sale the company gets their data from you for free at least

Went to their first day onboarding and it was 6 hours of introductions and repeated company slogan bullshit, left after hour 3 of doing shit in another window out of pure boredom