Red Flags of Recruiting Scams

Getting a message from a recruiter can seem like a great opportunity. Especially if you’re currently looking for work, it can seem fortunate. But recruiting scams often start out looking legitimate. It’s essential to do your homework, verify sources, and trust your instincts. It can seem frustrating to be so skeptical. But caution can help protect you and your finances.

See Executive Recruiter Scams with John Sidoti for a complete transcript of the Easy Prey podcast episode.

John Sidoti started his career in IT in 1991. After graduating from college with a degree in music performance and education, he needed a job. A friend worked at a computer store that needed a salesperson, and John was willing to take any job that paid. After only two weeks, the owner of the store told him that he was really bad at sales and suggested he learn to fix computers instead. John discovered he enjoyed fixing computer problems, and he was good at it. He worked at that computer store on and off for ten years.

In the late 1990s, there wasn’t much specialization in IT. If you worked with computers, you learned desktops, repairs, office setups, wiring, networking, servers, and everything else. With that background, John worked himself up through helpdesk and network design to his current position, which is Senior Director of Information Technology at Social Current, a nonprofit organization.

The Recruiting Scam John Fell For

At the end of 2019, John made a really bad career position. He left a stable position for a job at a startup that looked great on paper. He started on a Monday and went through all of the onboarding. On his way to work on Friday, he got a call saying they didn’t think he was a great fit. He was abruptly out of work, and then the pandemic shut everything down.

Finding manager or director roles was difficult, and there was a lot of competition. In early 2020, a recruiter messaged him on LinkedIn. John still has the exact message saved. It read:

I hope this message finds you well. My name is [made up name]. I’m a senior recruiting specialist at a reputable global recruitment firm, and they are recruiting for directors and VPs.

That’s exactly what John was looking for – it sounded great. He responded to the message, and they asked for his resume. When he sent it to them, they said it looked great and they wanted to interview him right away. The only problem was they had to get his resume into the HRIS system, and it wasn’t importing properly. John understood that every system was a little different. So he stripped out all the formatting and sent them what was basically a text file. They told him it still wasn’t working, and he needed to have a particular company format it for him. They would only charge $99.

The Scam Red Flag

That was the moment that made him pause. Up until then, everything felt normal about this situation. But this part didn’t feel right. He wasn’t thinking that it was a recruiting scam, though. Instead, he looked up some resume formatting advice, reformatted his resume again, and sent it back. They told him that no, they really needed him to go through this company.

That’s when he went to look at the company’s website. It cost $99 to reformat the resume, but they highly encouraged him to spend $249 to have it entirely rewritten. These fees were on top of the $1,000 executive recruiting fee that the recruiter had already said he’d need to pay.

This is the point of the recruiting scam where John stopped. The good part of the story was that he didn’t give them any money. But he had been out of work for three months and jumped on the opportunity with high expectations. He definitely spent a lot of time and effort on it that could have been used to search for and apply to real jobs.

Unmasking the Recruiting Scam

Trying to figure out what had happened to him, John did some research. He eventually found an article on Techalicious about job recruiting scams and realized what had happened. So he wrote his own post on LinkedIn. The post described his experience and advised people to avoid executive recruiter scams.

John had stopped talking to the original company after he realized they were a scam. But he kept getting emails, both with the same and with different URLs. In some cases, the names and stock photos were even the same. And he got responses on his LinkedIn post. A lot of responses. He’d originally written the post to share his pain and warn other people. He got a much bigger response than he’d expected – some people talked about going through similar experiences, and others wanted advice on whether something they were encountering right now was a recruiting scam.

Even now, four years after he made the post, it still gets comments. Around twenty people a month share their experiences with similar scams or ask if something they’re seeing looks like a scam. They’re all sharing information with other people. A lot of IT professionals have been in the game for a long time, but they’re still falling for the same scam. It’s important to know those scams are out there, know what warning signs to look for, and then actually do your due diligence to look for them.

You have to know what to look for and actually go and do the work and look for it.

John Sidoti

Warning Signs of Recruiting Scams

Just because you’re not looking for work doesn’t make you immune to recruiting scams. Especially at the executive level, it’s not uncommon for people to at least look at positions recruiters send them. And many people are willing to look at other options while they’re still employed, especially if it offers a better title or higher salary.

And recruiting scams don’t always look like scams at first glance. Some of the common advice about spotting scams is to beware of messages with grammar issues and typos, addresses that are suspicious, or websites that don’t look professional. Many of these scammers will put up nice-looking stock photos at their listed address, put in the effort to make a good-looking website, and write a correct and accurate message. If it looks bad, it’s probably a scam – but looking good doesn’t mean it’s safe.

Do Some Searches

One of the best things you can do to spot a recruiting scam is do some searching. Look at the Whois for the domain. Hidden information is not a major warning sign. There are plenty of reasons a legitimate person wouldn’t want their information out there like that. But if the domain has been registered for less than a year, that’s suspicious. Especially if their website says they’ve been in executive recruiting for a long time, a domain that new is probably a scam.

If you have a name or a photo, you can search for that too. One fake recruiter who is running scams right now is “Rachel Moore” from Synergy Executive Recruiting. If you reverse image search her photo, you’ll find a bunch of different names associated with it, because it’s a stock photo. Synergy Executive Recruiting doesn’t exist on LinkedIn. And there are several people on LinkedIn named Rachel Moore, but none of them have that photo.

We need to do the due diligence on our end.

John Sidoti

If you get recruiters texting you, especially if the text is vague, it’s a scam. Legitimate recruiters will never text. They will call, email, or message you on LinkedIn. And if you get something on LinkedIn, you still need to do your due diligence. Check their website, search for their name.

Check Websites and Profiles

The company websites themselves can sometimes provide clues that you’re looking at a scam. If they don’t have a direct phone number, that’s suspicious. Yes, we do live in an email world, but John has never gone through a hiring process where he didn’t interview either in person or over the phone. Real recruiters want to get a feel for who you are, and you can’t get a sense of personality through email. Any legitimate recruiting company will have a phone number.

John also doesn’t know any recruiter who doesn’t have a LinkedIn. If an individual recruiter or a recruiting company doesn’t have a page, it’s probably a scam. And those pages won’t just be placeholders, either. Recruiting companies will post about the jobs they’ve filled or that they have available. And recruiters will have a relevant work history. It’s not abnormal for recruiters to change companies fairly regularly, so if they have a history, that’s good. If they only have one or two recruiting jobs listed, they may be new to the industry. But if they don’t have much experience and are trying to recruit you for an executive position, beware – legitimate executive recruiting is done by experienced recruiters.

If a recruiter asks for personal information, like your driver’s license or Social Security number, that’s a major red flag. They may claim it’s for a background check, but recruiters don’t do background checks. That’s the responsibility of the company they’re recruiting for. Also be wary of any questions that are common security questions, like your mother’s maiden name or your first pet.

Recruiting Scams Target Anyone

Even though recruiting scams often don’t steal a lot of money in the grand scheme of things – the one that John fell for asked for only $1,249 at most – but if you’re not working, that’s a lot.

Even if you are working, you can still be a target. We’re all looking for the next big gig. John isn’t necessarily looking for a new job right now, but he still has old resumes still out there. And he still gets messages on LinkedIn asking if they can email him. He assumes most of those are bots, but it’s hard to tell.

Most of the recruiting scams John gets are through emails. They spend so much time on social engineering that they know exactly what words to put in the subject line to make you read it. Their email addresses look legitimate, and domains are cheap. Sometimes they even buy multiple domains that all point back to the same website. At some point, it just becomes laughable.

Once you learn what the markers are [of a recruiting scam], you can see it coming in.

John Sidoti

Be Aware

A lot of it comes down to, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. It’s easy to fall into complacency and ignore your gut feeling that something is wrong. John did eventually listen to his gut, and it saved him from losing money. But if he hadn’t been out of work and wanted it to be true, he probably would have noticed it was a recruiting scam much earlier.

[Be suspicious of] anything that makes you scratch your head and go, “what?”

John Sidoti

This is a challenge for a lot of scams. Many times, we hear the hook for a scam and it just doesn’t ring true to us. We’re not expecting a package, so when we get an email from Bob with customs about an issue with our package, we have no problem not responding. But if we are expecting a package coming through customs, all of the sudden the hook makes sense. It fits within what we expect, so we respond and get sucked in. If you’re out of work or unhappy in your job and a recruiter reaches out, it seems appropriate. So we’re more likely to get sucked in.

It sounds cynical to say that, but when you hear scam victims’ stories, this is almost always part of the equation. For someone who got caught in a romance scam, often they had recently lost their spouse and the scammer seemed nice and easy to talk to. They weren’t irresponsibly looking for relationships. But when scammers strike an area of our life where we have a need, it doesn’t seem suspicious, but fortuitous.

The Bottom Line on Recruiting Scams

We need to be diligent when a recruiter reaches out to us. It’s not just them interviewing us – we should interview them. If it starts over email or some form of instant message, jump on a call where you can see their face. It still could be a deepfake, but it will at least weed out the lower-effort scammers. You have to do whatever you can to protect yourself.

The bottom line with all of this is I fell for it. Sharing my story I’m hoping makes it so other people don’t fall for it.

John Sidoti

We all make mistakes, and we want to believe the best of people. John shares his story because it helps other people learn these scams exist and what to watch for. Recruiting scams aren’t even the only scams John has fallen for, either. Not realizing Facebook didn’t vet their ads, he purchased something through a Facebook ad and didn’t realize it was a scam until he sent the money. It had a lot of positive comments, but they were all bots.

In the end, just be careful. If it looks or feels weird, it probably is. If you have questions, don’t be afraid to ask someone. And if you fall for it, share your experience. Four years later, people are still benefitting from John’s experience falling from a recruiting scam. Sharing your story only makes the world better.

You can find John Sidoti on LinkedIn. He welcomes you to send a request or message or comment on his post – he will answer any questions he can if you’re trying to figure out if something is a scam.