6 safety tips for online job seekers

With a click of your mouse you can post your resume for millions to see. You can store five different cover letters at once and send out different versions without printing a single page. You can apply to hundreds of employers without ever getting in a car or picking up the phone.

Online job hunting
Here are six simple ways to protect your personal
data from thieving eyes.

Safety tips
1. Know what scammers want.
2. Find a job board you trust.
3. Sniff ads for phishiness.
4. Apply to a handful of employers.
5. Depersonalize your resume.
6. Protect your computer.

You can also expose yourself to scammers.

There’s no doubt about it — if you want to join the online job search bandwagon, there are plenty of places to park your resume. Some attact quite a crowd: Careerbuilder.com, for instance, says it has more than 1 million jobs and 15 million resumes on its site.

Unfortunately, some con artists use the popularity of online job boards to find victims for their financial schemes. By scouring through resumes and sending e-mails to job seekers or posting their own ads, scammers can lure job seekers onto bogus sites or entice them to pay upfront fees for phantom jobs. It even happens on the big-name sites: Monster.com states in its “Be Safe” section that fraudulent job listings are sometimes posted to collect sensitive data from unwitting job seekers.

With the plethora of job boards on the Web, experts advise that consumers should stay on top of the latest online employment scams and take steps to post their resume safely.

Scams such as e-mails from phony employers and bogus requests for background checks can bring disastrous consequences to consumers who aren’t careful with their personal information. Armed with your Social Security number, a driver license number or date of birth, a scammer can have a field day. You could be saying goodbye to your identity and your credit — and still be unemployed.

Before you post that resume or respond to that e-mail offering an immediate position, stop, read and listen. Are you online job board-savvy?

Scammers like to go phishing
“A good rule of thumb is to never give out anything over the Internet or telephone that you wouldn’t want a criminal to have,” says Jim Stickley, co-founder, CTO and vice president of engineering at TraceSecurity, a company that works with corporations to help them secure their data and meet security-industry standards. If the company offering your dream job needs your confidential information, you should visit with them face-to-face to make sure they are a real company. If they are remote, then you need to take steps to verify their legitimacy, says Stickley.

While e-mails demanding personal or financial information such as credit card numbers, bank account numbers or your Social Security number should raise red flags and tip you off to job scams, e-mails from employers expressing real interest in you as a job candidate are less cut and dried.

1. Know what scammers want.
Legitimate companies might want job candidates’ resumes entered into in their own tracking systems, so requests for candidates to apply on the employer’s Web site should not necessarily warrant suspicion.
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Be wary, however, if you’re asked to complete a background check on a site before you can be considered for the position. There might even be a legitimate-looking check-off box next to a statement that says “I authorize XYZ company to perform a complete background check on me,” at the end of the application, says Stickley. All the desperate job seeker has to do is supply a Social Security number and driver license number to complete the necessary background check.

“Of course, once the user enters this information into the Web site, they are now totally ruined,” he says. Instead of gainful employment, the applicant could lose their identity to a crook.

The need for a background check should raise an eyebrow. Background checks cost money, so employers won’t usually perform them until after they’ve interviewed you, says career coach Marcia Merrill, who has more than 18 years of experience as a career counselor, career librarian and career-site Web manager. Instead of completing the background check, she says, reply and ask if they can tell you exactly what’s expected of you in the position and when you can come in for an interview. “It’s a diplomatic way of saying ‘I’m not going to answer you until I know more about you,’” says Merrill. Legitimate companies should have a good explanation for it or honor a request to postpone the background check until after an interview.

Also consider who the e-mail originates from. If you recognize the company name and see that the reply-to e-mail address matches it, go to the Web site and see if the site checks out. If there’s a string of numbers before the “.com” portion of the Web address, when you go to the site, it’s probably a scam, says Steven Rothberg, president and founder of collegerecruiter.com, an online job board and information source for students and recent college graduates. The recognized company name should come before the “.com.”

If you don’t recognize the business name, research the company before you reply to the e-mail by:

* Visiting the Better Business Bureau Web site. See if the company exists, how long it’s been around and what kinds of complaints, if any, have been filed against it.
* Networking. Talk to people in the industry and ask them what they’ve heard about the company.
* Visiting the secretary of state’s Web site. Find out in which state the company does business. If they’re in New York, the New York secretary of state office should have a listing for them online, says Rothberg. Make sure that information, such as the business address, matches the listing. “Bogus organizations won’t be registered with the secretary of state office.”
* Conducting a Google or Yahoo search for information on the company. You should find its Web site, or at least a phone number or publication that mentions it. If you see many blogs and sites complaining about the company, that could be a red flag.
* Checking questionable salary offers against employee-earnings sites such as salary.com to see if the numbers come within a normal range.
* Conducting a Web search for terms in the job description you don’t understand.

If you’re still in doubt, reply without sending a resume. Ask the employer or human resources manager for whatever piece of information would satisfy your concerns, such as a reply e-mail from a corporate e-mail address, suggests Rothberg. Or, you could call the company and ask to speak with the person who sent you the e-mail. They should be happy to start a conversation with you if they’re trying to fill a job opening, says Steven Branigan, president of CyanLine, an internet security consulting firm, and author of “High-Tech Crimes Revealed.”
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2. Find a job board you trust.
A privacy policy doesn’t guarantee privacy. If they’re willing to con you, they’re probably willing to post a phony privacy policy. “Fake eBay sites have privacy policies,” says Branigan. For better security, he suggests sticking with job boards you’ve heard of, such as Monster.com, Careerbuilder.com, Dice.com or Hotjobs.com — not only because they are better known but because they will have the most connections. When it comes to getting that all-important job interview, “it’s all about connections,” says Branigan.

For more security comfort, find out how hard it is to create a job posting on that job board, says Branigan. Click through the employer links rather than the job seeker links to see what they are asking employers. Generally, the more trustworthy sites will charge employers a fee to look at resumes, says Margot Carmichael Lester, author of “The Real Life Guide to Starting Your Career” and monthly contributor to Monster.com.

Besides controlling who looks at your resume, trustworthy sites should let you control how much of your resume remains private, says Lester. If they don’t let you mask your resume, don’t post your resume on their site.

Once you find a job board you trust, carefully read the employment listings before you reply to them with an application.

3. Sniff ads for a phishiness
Learn to spot a suspicious ad. Misspelled words in a job ad are a tip-off to rip-offs. “There seems to be some rule among scammers that there must be at least one misspelled word,” says Branigan.

Also, verify that the Web site’s link in the ad goes to the domain advertised in the message. Just because the link reads “BestJobInTheWorld.com” doesn’t mean the link will actually take you to a site by that name. If they don’t match, watch out. Another sign of danger is when the job description sounds too good to be true or doesn’t make sense.

International job opportunities can be suspect, says Merrill. Traveling might sound ideal, but not if the company makes you pay for the flight or fraudulently sucks money from you somehow. See if the company really exists first by conducting a Web search.

“Blind ads” — advertisements that omit a company’s name — shouldn’t necessarily raise an eyebrow, but the business should still describe itself and the open position well. If the ad lacks enough information for you to figure out what the job entails, it’s probably a scam, says Lester.

All the experts generally agreed on one characteristic: If the ad mentions any upfront fees, it’s most likely a scam. The employer pays, not the other way around.

4. Apply to a handful of employers.
Be selective when answering job ads. “The problem comes in when candidates apply to as many jobs as they can. Nobody has the time to verify hundreds of employers,” Rothberg says. Sticking with a few companies you trust allows you to track who has your resume — and who can claim to have seen it in an e-mail.

5. Depersonalize your resume.
Before you click on the send button, review the information on your resume. Are you revealing too much? You can’t control who views your resume, but you can control what the public gets to know about you. To post your resume safely, hide these details from the public eye:

* Your home address — You never know if a stalker might use it. Instead, rent a postal box close to where you live, suggests Rothberg. Employers won’t care if you don’t list a street address — just that your address is local.
* Your home phone number — Use a phone number that is unlisted, such as a cell phone number, says Rothberg. “Otherwise I can go to Google and search for your home address with your home phone number.”
* Your Social Security number — This is the gateway to your identity.
* Your date of birth — This is another key ingredient to your identity.
* A photo of yourself — “Never attach a photo unless you’re applying for a modeling or acting position,” says Rothberg. There could be a stalker at the new company who might see it, he says. Plus, employers simply have no use for photos.
* Your marital status or mother’s maiden name– Employers don’t need to know.
* References — You’re putting your friend’s and family’s names, addresses and phone numbers out there. Besides endangering them, employers don’t need references until after an interview.
* Your former employer’s company name — You can get away with describing the work you did for past employers. Legitimate companies will still be interested in you and fraudulent companies will know less about you.

6. Protect for your computer.
Invest in some good anti-spam and anti-phishing software, such as Cloudmark’s Desktop, McAfee’s Spam Killer or Mail Frontier’s Desktop to help filter out future phishing e-mails.

Report scams — victim, or not
If you see a suspect ad or e-mail or think you were a victim of fraud, report the incident to the authorities and the job board. File a complaint with the IC3, or with the Federal Trade Commission. If the scam involves the mail in any way, also alert the United States Postal Service.

Abstinence works
You don’t have to answer the phone just because it rings. The same goes for e-mails and job ads with all the right words. Resist the urge to respond to these come-ons right away and research the company’s claims. If anything smells phishy, just move on. A real job awaits!

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