Bogus Job Postings
I received an email earlier today from a college career service office professional asking for advice about what to do about the huge number of job postings she's receiving from organizations that help U.S. college students teach English abroad. The positions are typically in Asian countries, but not always. Her concern is that there are so many of these organizations and so many of them are new that it isn't feasible for her small staff to determine which ones are legitimate, which ones are scams, and which ones are somewhere in between.
I recommended that she stop trying to determine whether a legitimate job posting ad is going to be of interest to her students. If the organization posting the ad has a valid phone number that matches with the address information they've provided and their email address matches with their domain name, then it is quite unlikely that the organization is going to try to scam anyone. We use litmus tests such as those when we screen jobs being posted to CollegeRecruiter.com so why shouldn't a college career service office do the same? Also, these are adults that we're talking about, not 12 year olds, so they need to take responsibility for their own job search efforts and part of that is evaluating to whom they're sending their information. A little due diligence is in order, so I recommended to the career service office professional that she stop spending so much time evaluating the quality of the offers being posted by legitimate organizations and instead spend that time educating her students on how to evaluate the offers themselves. If she and her staff continue to do that work for the students, then when they graduate they will not have that very important skill.
I'm sure that there are some other great solutions out there to this very real, very serious problem. Let's hear them! Please post your suggestions as comments to this blog entry and I'll be happy to publish them so that we can all share our best practices.
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