Are these job offers legit or spam?

October 9, 2007 5:59 AM

Since I posted my resume online, I keep receiving employment offers that don't seem to have anything to do with my field. However, since I'm not finding anything in my field, I'm tempted to take something else. How do I know if these offers are legit?

I have my resume posted on Monster, CareerBuilder, and a few smaller sites. At least a few times per week I receive an e-mail that begins something like "I recently found your resume posted on the internet and determined that your experience and qualifications make you an ideal candidate to fill XXX position with YYY" - where XXX is either "sales" or "account executive" and YYY is some company I've never heard of. My resume is specific to my field, and I have zero sales or pharma experience, yet I'm receiving employment offers for pharmaceutical sales positions? The e-mail contains a link to a form that requests more information on me.

Today I got one from "AdminSolutionsGroup" telling me that I was qualified to do administrative work from home. In my current situation, this actually sounds pretty decent. However, the base salary they list is suspiciously high.

I haven't job-hunted in a long time, so I'm not really current on how it all works nowadays. Is this just spam? Are these offers legit? How would I know?

posted by desjardins to work & money (8 comments total)

Its spam. I get them all the time.
posted by missmagenta at 6:09 AM on October 9, 2007

Spam+scam. Don't fill in the forms, it's often either

-identity theft.
-scam to sell you a package to start home business.

If it were genuine, then surely they'd contact you by a human process (voice, or direct email from an HR rep) and leave contact details for you to return a call, rather than directing you to a webpage.
posted by chrisbucks at 6:20 AM on October 9, 2007

You can get legit offers by email (I get those quite often too) but those arent. Anything thats sales, account executive or work from home type jobs are scams and spam. The easiest way to spot the real from the spam is that real offers will state a salary (thats a reasonable figure) or say based on experience or negotiable. The spammy scam ones are always you could earn up to $100k! (with 90% being commission or some other such scam) they almost always have rediculously high stated wages and promises of great benefits.

They're just like phishing scams, because you're not in any of the fields they offering jobs in, its easy to dismiss them as spam, just as when I get phishing emails about my barclays bank account (which I don't have).
They send the email out to hundreds of thousands of addresses (maybe even millions) it costs very little but there will be enough guillable people that get the email who are looking for a job and have experience in sales or whatever and will believe it to be legit. Just as there will be plenty of people who do have accounts at barclays bank who might be fooled by the fake email.
posted by missmagenta at 6:33 AM on October 9, 2007

Spam. Good rule of thumb: when in doubt, it's spam.
posted by scottreynen at 6:59 AM on October 9, 2007

Nthing spammity-spam. If these were real job offers, they would contact you via phone or email in a more individualized way. No legit employer seeks employees by sending out mass emails.

This is why I took my resume down from Monster, because of the spam and potential for ID theft.

And, if you are looking for work and willing to branch out from your field, try a temp agency - they (often) find you work pretty quickly, and it's a low-commitment way to explore different fields and industries. Plus a temp job can be a stepping-stone to a permanent one.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 7:09 AM on October 9, 2007

Nobody legitimate is going to offer you a job purely on the basis of your resume. Period.

Consider if you were someone looking to hire someone. Would you hire someone you had never heard of and had had no contact with at all, just because they posted an unverified resume online, no matter how good that resume sounded? Would you want to work for anyone who did, even if they were legitimate?
posted by cerebus19 at 7:24 AM on October 9, 2007

"pharma sales" = "online drug store spammer"

Pharma sales is a huge growth sector right now, but reputable companies don't blindly recruit like that.
posted by mkultra at 7:41 AM on October 9, 2007

Legit job offers from internet job board postings:

1. Are rare (at least from monster/hotjobs/dice) - the volume of applicants is so huge that unless you're the one they want you'll never hear from them;
2. Will come addressed to you personally;
3. Will request either more information or a time to meet.

So yeah, spam. Sorry 'bout that.
posted by pdb at 8:01 AM on October 9, 2007