If you are looking for work, I strongly suggest you do your due diligence when looking on the Canadian Government Job Bank. Why? Because I cannot tell you how many times, I have a viewed a job, that has been flagged as verified by the site, but it is actually bogus. I have seen so many of these and have taken the time to report a couple of them, but to be honest it would be a full-time job to report them all. Job hunting is an onerous task as it is, without having to worry if a posting is legitimate or not. I understand that it would be very time-consuming to have an actual person view all the jobs posted on the site, but if you are going to go to the trouble of saying that you have verified a job, it should be more reliable. They put the following disclaimer on the bottom of the post “Important notice: This job posting was posted directly by the employer on Job Bank. The Government of Canada has taken steps to make sure it is accurate and reliable but cannot guarantee its authenticity.” so really why bother saying any of the postings are verified when you cannot guarantee it’s accuracy, seems pointless to me and encourages people to share information, via their resume, with people who are phishing for personal information and more!
Anyway, let me show the different ways that you can tell if a job is genuine. Firstly, you need to establish that the company actually exists. It is so easy to build a website these days, you can simply create one to advertise the company the job is with and assume people will accept it as legitimate. If the people who do this spent more time building it and paying attention to detail, they may just get away with it, however, all the ones I have seen do not. It is almost laughable.
Here is the example I came across this morning. I do not know how long the posting will be up, but you can view the actual job listing here (update, the job has been removed). The job advertised is for an Administrative Assistant for a company called Levy’s Cleaning Services.
First of all, what may have attracted to you to the role, as in my case, is a decent hourly wage. Some of the bogus jobs I have seen in the past have advertised an unusually high wage, for the job description, which is the first give away. Now it seems they just elevate it slightly to make it stand out, but not too over the top. If the pay does seem extremely generous, be a little wary.
Secondly, I always research the company on Google. 75% of Canadian businesses have a website, if they don’t have a website they will more than likely have a presence on social media. For the small percentage that do not have either, you will at least find their location showing up on Google maps. If you cannot find any of the above, that is a huge red flag that it is not a legitimate company. In the case of Levy’s Cleaning Company, Google could not locate them anywhere in St. Thomas or London, which were the two cities they were advertising positions for.
One of the ways you can quickly see if a company has a website presence is by looking at the contact email that they ask you to send your resume to, see the sample job listing above. In the case of this company, they have manager@leviclean.com. So voila, they have a website https://leviclean.com. Here is where the fun begins. When you first open the website it looks real and like a good company, but once you start clicking on pages you will see all kinds of tell-tale signs that it has been created for the purpose of trying to make a job look authentic. Here are some examples from the above website:
Under all their images, the wording is in Latin, they have not even bothered to make up anything that makes sense for what they are advertising. If you look at the screen shot below you will see an example of this, plus check out the phone number!
If that is not enough, as some companies do at least take the time to complete the home page, make sure you check out all the other pages and images, especially the About Us and Contact pages. On the contact page for this company, they list their address as 123, Central Square, New York. There is no such address and they put a comma after the 123. Plus, their contact email is info@example.com, again what can I say.
Also if you click on any links that they include on their website, 9 times out of 10, they do not link to anything, or they link to the same page. When you click on their social media icons same thing, nothing happens.
The best part here is when you search Google for their address, not only do you see that it does not exist, Google brings up all these other companies with the same address and email address.
Call us we’re The Dust Busters! Plus there were others I couldn’t fit on the print screen. You can see the same use of Latin, the same phone number 123-456-7890, same email address and physical address with the use of a comma after the number and 4 digit zip code. Hmm…let me think about this for a minute.
I really could go on and point out a lot more but I think you get the idea. I do have to say though that there was one job opening that I found on Job Bank where their website was done much better than the one above. They had taken the time to fill in information related to the business, even though it was a little iffy. But when you read their return policy on their website, it talked about products that were very different to what they said they were selling, the English was very badly written and most of it just didn’t make sense. It was like they had copied and pasted from a few different websites. Add to that the use of a Gmail address as the email address where to send your resume, plus the location they used was an existing address in London, but it was clearly a random residential address and not a business at all. I actually reported this job as I didn’t want anyone getting scammed by it.
My point in sharing this is not only because of my frustration with it all, but it is happening so often and the Canadian Government is saying that they have verified the job. Why would they do that? Mere incompetence or to help inflate our employment numbers to make the economy seem better.
Why are people pretending to have job openings? My guess is that they are fishing for personal information. You send them a resume with your name, address, phone number, email address and info about yourself, then they will probably contact you requesting more information that they can use.
So please protect yourself. Many people are looking for jobs and a lot of us would not even stop to think that the job is not real, as it is advertised and verified by the government. Please do your due diligence and protect yourself from possible identity theft, amongst other things.
Please note too, that many other job sites like indeed.ca, pull in jobs that are advertised elsewhere, like from the Canadian Job Bank. If you know the company is legitimate go to their website and see if you can apply for the job directly from there, if not, apply through the place where you saw the job advertised, but only if you believe it is a genuine position available.
