Get job, not fleeced

With a click of your mouse, you can post your résumé 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.

You can also expose yourself to scammers.

Some con artists use the popularity of online job boards to find victims for their financial schemes. By scouring through résumés 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.

“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 helps corporations secure their data and meet security-industry standards.

Some safety tips for online job-seekers:

• Be wary if you’re asked to supply a Social Security number and driver-license number on a Web site before you can be considered for a position. 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.

• Find a job board you trust. Stick with job boards you’ve heard of, such as Monster.com, Careerbuilder.com, NWJobs.com, Dice.com or Hotjobs.com — not only because they are better known, but because they will have the most connections. For more security comfort, find out how hard it is to create a job posting on that job board, says Steven Branigan, president of CyanLine, an Internet security consulting firm and author of “High-Tech Crimes Revealed.” 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 résumés, 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 résumé, trustworthy sites should let you control how much of your résumé remains private, says Lester. If they don’t let you mask your résumé, don’t post your résumé on their site.

• Learn how to spot a suspicious ad. Misspelled words in a job ad are a tip-off to rip-offs. Also, verify that the Web site’s link in the ad goes to the domain advertised in the message. Another sign of danger is when the job description sounds too good to be true, or doesn’t make sense. If the ad mentions any upfront fees, it’s most likely a scam. The employer pays, not the other way around.

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• Be selective when answering job ads. Sticking with a few companies you trust allows you to track who has your résumé — and who can claim to have seen it in an e-mail.

• Depersonalize your résumé. Are you revealing too much? Hide these details from the public eye: Your home address, home phone number (use an unlisted number, such as a cellphone number, which can’t be tracked back to a home address), Social Security number, date of birth, marital status, maiden name and references. There’s no reason to attach a photo of yourself, unless you’re applying for a modeling or acting position. There’s also no reason to mention 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.

• Protect your computer. Invest in anti-spam and anti-phishing software, such as Cloudmark’s Desktop, McAfee’s Spam Killer or Mail Frontier’s Desktop.

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