The Virtual Buddha: Learning How to Navigate the World

So today I did a post on LinkedIn about my gratitude for all the people who I’ve worked with. I know a lot of my success would have never had happened without all of my colleagues that I worked with and interacted with. That said, there were some others that tried to take advantage of that post: namely, recruiter scammers.

Now these aren’t new but sometimes we’re not aware of them until we’re job searching. When I last looked for work (about 35+ years ago!!), things were different. You’d print out your resume, scan through the newspaper, reach out to friends, hit the pavement and pass out your resume. Job searching today still has some similarities to then, largely around networking but it is also very different.

The role of recruiters is to find the best candidate for a specific job. And a place like LinkedIn is a prime meeting place for that kind of connection. Unfortunately, some have taken to scamming job searchers. The trick is being able to identify scammers versus legitimate recruiters. So here’s a couple of quick, easy tricks:

1. If someone reaches out to you that you don’t know, check their profile. Look for a description of who they are in their About section. Copy that and go to a site like CopyLeaks. They can validate whether that content is AI generated or not.
   
   Now, I get using AI to generate that About section. I’ve used it before but have found it to get too generic in it’s description as well as too hallucinating (incorrect assumptions) at times. I’ve actually decided to go with my own personal, error-prone prose (I admit to often getting my tenses mixed up!).
2. The other thing to do to tell if they are real or not is to download their image. This can be used to reverse image search in most search engines. I’ve actually found the original source of the image and not even close to the same name.
3. Look for the overuse of the word “Kindly”. I’m not sure where this started but I’ve noticed this overused.
4. Look at their posts/comments on others. One such scammer had done over 300 posts with the exact same posting every time. I mean, I get reusing content but have some variety and be unique.

These straightforward steps can help you determine whether or not someone is truly matching you with your dream job. Or just trying to fill their pockets. Anyways, I thought it was important to share as companies are doing layoffs regularly and if you’re like me, feeling a little lost and overwhelmed in the noise, it can be easy to get swayed the wrong way. Do NOT let yourself be taken in. A little paranoia can go a long way. ;)