Scam Jobs! Too good to be true? Probably!

Okay, this is going to be one of my scam posts. The biggest problem that I’ve been facing since starting the trek to a professional career is facing the reality that so many people out there are willing to take advantage of you. They prey on the fact that we are currently in a bad economy and that millions of people are jobless (10% unemployment doesn’t count the number of people who have just given up on looking for jobs or are looking for full-time employment). These people are the ones who promise you great jobs with little or no experience needed. They offer great pay and things like “be your own boss” or “unlimited earning potential” and tell you that “any major is welcome." These are usually jobs postings listed in sales/marketing - stuff like financial advisor for a no-name company or inside/outside sales associate. The jobs usually entail literally cold calling people, finding potential customers from the general population. They vary from job to job, but many of them are basically pyramid schemes. You go out, sell a product, and get a very small percentage of the profit. The company does not really back you up and unless you’re great at it, you will not earn any money. In fact, many companies will charge you for potential leads if you cannot find any yourself. This is not to put down the whole profession, rather the advertising of these jobs. I will write a much more in-depth article on financial advisors and my experience with that, but today will be about real scam jobs.

One thing I forgot to mention when I was talking about monsterjobs.com was that once you publish your profile and make it public, anyone can look at it. That's usually a good thing, but it also allows scammers to find it too. These scammers are usually targeting a specific group of people and having a search function like monster at their disposal is definitely something they're willing to pay for. So I received a phone call last week from a cell phone in DC. I picked up and had a 10 minute phone call with someone named Allen. He told me that he worked for a company called DoingWap. He asked me if I was still looking for a job, as they had a business analyst position opening up. He also asked me what my visa situation was. That was the first thing that turned my BS alarm on. Why would he ask me what my visa situation was? In times like these, almost no companies are offering to sponsor foreigners. He went on ask me if I spoke Chinese. I said I did and he proceeded to explain the rest in Chinese. I was told that they were this great new company in New Jersey (remember how the phone number is a cell phone from DC?) and that they were offering free four week training in all aspects of their business from finance to tons of IT things. He told me that they were looking for people who were fluent in Chinese and English and were able to understand financial data. I have to say, from the phone call, I was really impressed. The program seems really great... wait, did he just say free training? If you get hired shouldn’t your training be free? What kind of company asks you to pay for training? I told him that I was very interested in this position. He asked when was the earliest I could come in for an interview, and after scheduling for Tuesday, he told me he would email me more information. After the call, I was very excited - the job sounded great, I was able to use all the things that I had just learned in college and take advantage of the fact that I am fluent in Chinese. Fifteen minutes later I got an email:




First of all, there are four different font types and three colors in fewer than 500 words. The second sentence has spelling mistakes. Already this thing starts looking fishy. And the training looks insane. I would literally have to eat, sleep, and drink information for a whole month to learn all that. No way in hell anyone can cover that much stuff in-depth in under one month. No freaking way, especially if I was a foreign student without a native grasp on English (which is who they were mainly looking for, I later realized). He was nice enough to give me the website address in the first sentence. I went there. For a quick second it actually looks really professional. But the first thing I noticed about Doingwap was this:



Though the website looks really nice and creative, all the words are filler. They don’t tell you anything about what the company actually does. There’s also no way that they could’ve worked for so many Fortune 500 companies with a crappy tagline like, “You will have definitely good start with us!” It would be like me opening a Chinese restaurant with the motto “Now we free of poison I promise!”

Wellm needless to say, my BS alarmed turned on full-blast and I decided to look for information about this company. A quick google search shows nothing. This company has done itself a great favor by inundating job websites with fake jobs. They apparently have jobs throughout the US and are paying people with absolutely no experience very well. Following many pages of search I finally came upon one thing. Another blog, actually! In Michael Hine’s blog he talks about having almost the same experience as me, except that instead of offering free training, the company offered free training with a $1000 deposit. Alarms are blaring now. Anytime a company hires you and expects you to pay for training, run away. Why? Because it’s a retarded hiring process and also because it’s most likely a scam. If I was hiring people who I felt would be great for the job, why would I charge them for training? That would be like getting hired to pay your employer - it's basically indentured servitude. So with that tidbit of information, I decided that there had to be more out there. So I googled “Doingwap Scam” and lo and behold the second link led me to an indeed forum about another company called Hd Dimension. Wait… isn’t that a different company? Actually, not exactly! From the forum posts the two companies seem very similar. Here are some of the complaints:



Hmm, seems like the same practice… offering training, the promise of a great job, and of course people complaining about how they haven’t heard back from these people. Great, though if you read further down you begin to notice that the scammers actually make fake accounts on Indeed and post things like this:



First of all, who the hell would hire someone in the USA for a job that requires you to consult other Americans, when your English is like this:

• “I think it’s great with HD Dimension Corp to safe a prospect Future……I know what is the value of HD Dimension Corp …… In Wall Street”

You know what this reminds me of? French class in high school when I'd forget to study for an exam and bullshited by adding er at the end of every verb. Je watcher le television.

And if that wasn’t enough, when you look carefully at the bottom post, you can see it’s clearly written by someone who’s been scammed. He knows how it works and he’s also 100% sure that it’s fake.

So how did I know that HD dimension and DoingWap are the same company? Well, if you go to the last page on the forum, you’ll see that people have been getting phone calls from HD Dimension that seem suspiciously like the one I received from DoingWap. So, I decided to check out the similarities between the companies. The first similarity is that they both have very snazzy websites - everything looks really professional. Another thing is that the content on both websites are the same. They offer the same jobs and all the descriptions are exactly the same.

One more glaring similarity, which was basically the nail in the coffin:




Really? They have the same address and phone number! That’s absolutely ridiculous!!! At this point, I was 1000% sure this was a fake job. I decided to find out the extent of their scam. The only way was to contact them again, so I immediately wrote back:



Of course there's been no response email. I’m supposed to have the interview tomorrow (I'm obviously not going), and still nothing.

The lesson I've learned from this is that if it sounds too good to be true, it definitely is. Though many of us are desperate for jobs, we deserve better than scams. Know that when you are looking for a job, if they don’t treat you with respect then it’s not worth your time. You are going to be working your butt off for a company and if they don’t show you that they value you from the get-go, they’re not going to value you when you work for them in the long run, either.

Whenever you find out about a job, do tons of research. You’ll find out more about the company and be better prepared for interviews as well. Also, if you happened to have an experience like the one I've written about here and would like to share it, please email me about it at jobhuntard@gmail.com. As always, good luck and keep on truckin'! Have patience!

-Paulz

Back and a quick summary!

Holy moly! I was gone or a while guys! Sorry for the lack of quick updates, as I am trying to figure out exactly how to present the blog and what we're planning on doing for everybody. With that said, this post will be a quick summary of the past several posts and my views on the experiences that we are all having.

The first and biggest similarity between all of us is that we are recent college graduates. It's barely been 3 months since we've walked away from college and we're all a bit stressed. Another similarity is that we're all looking for entry-level jobs. This means that other than requiring a bachelor's degree, the job requirements are retarded things like "work in a group" or "be able to work under stressful conditions" or "be able to follow instructions" or "know how to use Microsoft Office." All of these things are fucking ridiculous, and the commonality between all of this is that we obviously meet these requirements. This means that the only advantages you can create for yourself are the following:

1. Make a really professional cover letter. It's the first thing that gets read - often, it determines the first impression they have of you and sets their perception of you for the rest of process. If you write "y'all" or "plz give me a job" in your cover letter it's just as bad as writing "dude" or "im actually really racist please hire me."
   
2. Have your resume match the job you're looking for. If it's a science research job don't include credentials like "fluent in german and have great sales experience."
   
3. Keep on talking to people in the business. It does not mean cold calling people, but let people who might help you network know your goals. It's the most important thing. Let them know what you're interested in and that you're willing to prove this to them through actions, not words.
   
4. Keep on applying and getting yourself known! Advertise that you're not a slacker and that you're actually doing stuff. Everyone is in the same boat and if you don't apply to jobs you won't find a job. The more you apply the faster you'll learn and the more you can contribute to this website!
   
5. Keep up with the industry - it helps you gain knowledge of which parts of it are picking up/slowing down. Plus, you won't have to study as much when you do get that interview.

There are so many more but these are the first five things you can do to give yourself the most effective boost. Unfortunately, most of this is still chance, but if you're truly dedicated to the job, people will notice and hopefully we'll all find employment soon! I'll have a much larger, more fun post on Monday. I'll be studying at the airport for four hours so I'll have plenty of time. Remember, if you have an article please send it to me at jobhuntard@gmail.com. It'll help all of us!

-Paul

P.S. Janelle sent me a great great article about the importance of talking to people in the business. Point 3 is definitely proven in this article.

From a little to a lot!

Hey it's Paul here! Thanks for coming to the site - as you can see we've had multiple authors already introduce themselves and their goals. I guess it's my turn now?

I am also another graduate from a top tier university. I graduated with a degree in Finance and Biology, two entirely different majors but hopefully it'll come to use later in life. So finding a job in this economy is tough, especially when you make mistakes like I did. I decided on my major towards the beginning of Junior year and basically left no time for an internship which would've given me real world experience. So, what to do now? Well, since graduation I have been keeping myself busy. The first thing I did was to write down a list of goals. What did I want to do with my degree? I created a list of jobs that I thought were interesting. They ranged from financial analyst to credit analyst to underwriting specialist to just about everything that required a financial degree. When that was finished, I decided on how to obtain a position of that nature and what the job prospects were. The best source of information I found for this was through the Bureau of Labor Statistics using their Occupational Outlook handbook. Linked here. This is a very powerful resource for finding which fields are growing the fastest and what requirements are necessary for each position. From there I tailored my resume to fit these positions (more on that during later posts). Following that I used a wide variety of websites to find jobs. The most useful has been monster.com. I put up my resume on there as well as filled out the long and tedious (though maybe useful) profile. From there I was able to obtain daily feeds on new jobs that fit what I wanted. Also another source of jobs that I have been using is USAjobs.gov. This website contains all the government jobs available in the country. All bureaus must place their jobs here first, so this is the largest and most up-to-date website for all government jobs. Considering that the government is the largest employer in the country, this may be a great place to start. I will go through a more detailed overview of Usajobs later, as I feel that it takes a lot of effort to apply to jobs through this site and it is very tricky. I have also been using my school career site. Each school has one and each school updates theirs with internships as well as full-time positions. Your school's career site may be the best bet, as alumni connections can help a lot with landing your first job out of college. I myself have received interviews via this resource - though unsuccessful, it is a proven source of job opportunities. There are many more websites that I have been using, but those listed here are the best ones for possible positions.

Now, besides looking for jobs, what else have I been doing? Well, as soon as I got back from school the most important thing was to get a job - any job. I needed something that would give me disposable income and fill my resume. As one of my professors mentioned to me right before I graduated, there's nothing worse on a resume than a blank spot on your resume. So what did I do? I did what many other Americans in my position have been doing. I started looking for part time work. I did this by literally visiting every single store near me and filling out applications. As time went on, I realized that this may not have been the most effective way of getting jobs. I began to realize that unless I talked to the manager directly, my chances of being hired were basically slim to none. There were many more people looking for jobs as well and it was really difficult to stand out. Luckily, I found a great website tailored specifically to part-time jobs called snagajob.com. This site works just like monster, but it's only for hourly employment. It not only tracks every single opening in your area, but it also offers to help you apply for them. Through this and applying to company websites, I was finally able to obtain a job at Macy's. I work there part-time and it's great. Though I'm not happy with the fact that my first job out of college is working retail, I am grateful that I was able to avoid a gap in my resume.

So to summarize, find out what your goals are and find out what employers are looking for in that position. Finding jobs is tough because so many companies are in a hiring freeze right now, so the best thing to do is keep your skills fresh by constantly using/updating them and fill the time by being productive. Working part-time at Macy's with a finance degree is better than doing nothing with a finance degree. Good luck and always, if you have advice that you'd like to contribute to the blog, send it to jobhuntard@gmail.com! I'll make sure it's added and you are credited.

-Paulz

Literary genius to be!

Hi everyone! I’m Caitlin, a recent college grad who majored in English with a concentration in Creative Writing and minored in Education. Right now I’m living in the Washington, DC area and working as a summer nanny while searching for jobs in the publishing (or more likely waitressing) field in NYC. I have no previous experience in publishing, unless you count the profanity-laced tirades my academic advisor (an author) shared with me. Publishing is a huge industry, and I’m just now starting to really get a grasp on how many jobs I’m not entirely qualified to perform, and how many different disciplines publishing houses, literary agencies, and publications deal with. My goal is to break into either editing fiction for a major publishing house or working as a literary agent at a prominent literary agency, and in the process to avoid Ryan Reynolds’s route in The Proposal (i.e., slaving away with no hope of a promotion in an executive assistant position for 3+ years before finally achieving editorial fame through blackmail and marrying Sandra Bullock’s fugly Canadian ass).

So after graduation, instead of chasing my dreams/ending up homeless in Manhattan, I took up a former employer on the offer of being a nanny to her three daughters for the second consecutive summer so I could save up some money to move to the NYC area in the fall. In my free time, I’ve been looking into jobs in the publishing field as well as just straight up office and reception work for law firms, financial firms, really any firms that needed phones answered for 30,000 a year and up. I’ve even resorted to responding to craigslist postings at times. The truth is, I am more qualified for clerical work than anything else. My education prepared me to look for themes in literature, and how to teach people to look for themes in literature. Which is a really valuable skill if I can get work as a fiction editor, or the assistant to one, and if the publishing industry wasn’t literally dying right now.

That said, I’ve found a really great resource in mediabistro.com. You have to join to see their job postings, but membership is free and I elected to receive every email they ever send out – which can be kind of annoying at times, but it keeps me abreast of current events in publishing, which might come in handy in interviews later on. Plus, if you’re willing to devote the time and shell out the cash, mediabistro hosts workshops and classes designed to give you the tools to succeed at jobs in publishing. These workshops can be really broad, covering topics such as changing careers, or they can be really specific, like a 12-session self-paced course on learning to copy edit. (These are real seminars, or I guess the term is webinars, that I found on the site today while writing this post. So if you’re interested, check them out!) Because I’m kind of lacking in the cash department, I haven’t tried out these classes for myself, and I tend to be suspicious of things like this. It’s not going to give me work experience, and I’m not sure how seriously prospective employers take applicants who have completed them. I do know, however, that mediabistro is a respected source in the community, and it was pointed out to me by someone who currently works in publishing.

So that’s what I’ve got for now – I’ve spent the last few days revising my resume and rewriting my cover letter, and I’m about to apply for a whole new round of jobs. Wish me luck! And I wish everyone job hunting right now lots and lots of luck – as Erik mentioned before me, a lot of it is about being in the right place at the right time.

Living it up in NYC

Hello fellow job hunters! My name is Janelle, just graduated from college with a major in psychology and living on Long Island, close to NYC. My goal after graduating was to find a research assistant position in a hospital that focused on my particular interests in psychology. I've had a little bit of research experience working with professors while in school and I wanted to gain more experience before going on to grad school. No such luck yet on getting that research position unfortunately.

After graduating with no job, I knew that I needed something that would provide me with a little income while I continued my search. I figured a mall job would suit my purposes nicely and since all the high school kids were still in school in May, I figured I could beat them to the punch. It's interesting when you get turned down for a cashier position at a clothing store. One store told me that I didn't meet their qualifications. To say that kinda hurt would be an understatement. If I couldn't get a regular hourly wage job, how in the world can I get something better than that? Well I continued going to various stores in the mall and sending in online applications and eventually I heard back from Macy's. I went for the interview and they hired me. Great! (Said with a bit of sarcasm). It's certainly not what I had envisioned when I was planning my career goals, but at least now I have some money in my pocket.

Meanwhile, I continue to search for a better job; one that is in my field and one that gives me benefits (since my dad continues to remind me that after graduating I'm no longer on his health plan). I've been searching for research positions by going to hospital websites, specifically those hospitals that have psychology or psychiatry departments. Most will have pages discussing the various research being conducted and a phone number or an email address to contact someone. I've also been looking through monster and the New York Times classifieds (nytimes.com/classifieds).

Yeah, job searching is annoying as hell and I've gone through periods where I just stop looking altogether. But then after that I go back to searching. I know something will come along. When that store told me I didn't meet their qualifications, I was ready to quit. But I kept searching and got hired by Macy's. So I'm gonna do the same for my research position. It's all about staying positive.

-Janelle

Gettin' lucky

All of us have one friend who’s incredibly smart, and worked his ass off all through college. He got straight A’s in all his classes, and got hired straight out of school by that one company he always dreamed of working for. Now he’s happily settled in a new apartment, working 40 hours a week at a nice cushy desk, and making tons of money.

Well, fuck him. For the vast majority of us, the world doesn’t work like that. For better or for worse, the sad truth is that we’re dependent on luck more than anything else to get us hired. Graduated with a degree in electrical engineering? Great, good for you. But that means nothing if there’s no one out there looking for a new, unproven electrical engineer to slowly ease into a job. You, just like the rest of us, are largely dependent on being in the right place at the right time.

In this economy, the luck factor even applies to those menial, hourly wage jobs that we all swore back in college that we’d never take. I’m currently employed at Best Buy; last summer I was an intern at a law firm, where I made literally double my current hourly wage. But of course, neither that law firm nor any others in Boston are now interested in hiring some kid fresh out of college with very little experience. Believe me, by now I’ve probably applied to 25 or 30 of them. And none of them so much as sent me an email back telling me how much I suck.

I was even lucky to get hired by Best Buy. After the fruitless quest to get a “real” job, I figured I’d go ahead and just work as a cashier or something to earn some money in the mean time. But once again, no matter where I applied, I never even got called back. I was starting to seriously doubt my own existence. Finally, one day, a manager from Best Buy called and offered me an interview. As we sat there and talked, he mentioned that the company had instituted a hiring freeze for the past several months, due to the economy, but had just decided to lift it and expand their workforce. So, I was simply in the right place at the right time.

The point of all this? Here’s the CliffsNotes version: no matter how many rejection letters (or just plain stony silence) you get from potential employers, just keep at it, and don’t get discouraged. It’s extremely frustrating to see no return on your efforts for a long time, but stay focused and hopeful and sooner or later your luck will turn around.

~Erik

First post!

Hey, it's Paul here! Thanks for coming to our blog. As this is the first post, I'll try to state our goals here at JobHunter (or huntard, whichever one is more popular)!

The staff so far consists of myself (Paul), Erik, Caitlin and several other professional job hunters. We are recent graduates from top universities in all different majors.

Like the approximately 80% of recent graduates, we are without full-time jobs. The point of this blog is to tell you the things that our career centers didn't. Things that would have saved us countless hours of research and given us a much better advantage when we were first applying for jobs.

We will accomplish this through posting websites that we find useful, hints at the most important qualities that employers seem to be looking for, things that we know now that would have been really helpful when we first started our job hunts and also scams. In today's super competitive environment, there are tons of 'fake' jobs out there that promise a lot but actually are terrible.

Hopefully you guys will enjoy our posts! Leave comments and always, always feel free to leave helpful hints for us as well!

Happy hunting!

- Paul