Recruiters Post Fake Jobs, Sell Your Resume

While this isn't really related to proxies, I thought it would be interesting to IT professionals. Larry Chaffin from Network World did a study where they posted some fake resumes to the most popular online job sites, and found that their resume was sold many times over to other recruiters, and that many of the jobs they applied to (that they were qualified for), told them they were not just to get the resume for resale.

From the Network World article:

I was given a tip about the problem of recruiters posting fake jobs; this was just to get a 1000 or more resumes to sell. I guess I did not know this but there is a nice business going on now in this area. So to see what would happen we made up three resumes of fake people. The first was a CIO with 20 years of experience in big companies and a whole list of published articles. The next was a three time CCIE who has been doing networking for 15 years and had project management experience. The last was our entry level with a few certifications and administrations jobs.

So with that we posted for jobs that our resumes would fit and then some we were over qualified for, but that was ok. We looked at the positions that said remote position\work from home office with a national telecommunication company or fortune 100 companies. Also we applied for architect, engineer and executive jobs as well. We applied for around 70 jobs and even on some of them we made sure we had the experience they wanted. Being just right or over qualified you would think we would get a call, but no, we got emails saying sorry but you did not meet the qualification of the position.

Within three days we started to get emails and calls to our temp cell phone, these were from people we did not know or jobs we applied for while doing this project. They said they were forwarded our resume and had a low level position for a three time CCIE. We turned it down but after the first call we started to get allot of calls and email from India, China, Canada and other countries. Our resume was sold to these recruiters all over the world as an applicant who was looking for a job, was fully vetted and background check done. We were told this by one recruiter in Canada.

So we found out that it was true, people are selling resumes off job boards and I mean the top five that are out there. If you are just looking and have a job, be careful as you could get caught looking for a job. On the other hand you might get more than you asked for; the one job we applied for in the CIO roles was with a national recruiter and company and very well known. It is funny how the resume made it to Asia with our fake man.