The job board operated by U.K. newspaper The Guardian was reportedly hacked this past weekend and about 500,000 resumes and other information valuable to identity theft scum walked out the door. The response from The Guardian? Pathetic. They recommended that their users buy fraud prevention services. I wouldn't be surprised if The Guardian received commissions on the sale of those services, which would make this intolerable situation even worse as The Guardian would be profiting off of the inadequate security measures that it chose to put into place.

A number of job boards have been hacked and many, many more will be. The information contained in a job seeker registration is quite valuable to those who want to profit by stealing the identity of others. Many job seekers include their entire work history, educational background, contact information, and even social security numbers. Anyone with access to that information can take out a credit card in your name and then use that card to fraudulently buy products. They're stealing from the retailers in some cases and the banks in many other cases, but they're also stealing from the job seeker even if the job seeker ends up not being saddled with the bill because the fraud will inevitably harm the credit score of the job seeker.

Continue reading "Another Job Board Hacked" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on October 29, 2009 at 10:42 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) is finally acknowledging that many of their members market products, services, and other opportunities to businesses and consumers and that those advertising and other marketing campaigns should and now do fall under the purview of the DMA. No longer will members of the DMA be able to apply different standards to an ad campaign sent to the mobile phone of a consumer than to the same consumer's email address. That nonsensical "the same rules don't apply to difference devices" policy was used by a number of less ethical members of the DMA in order to circumvent the DMA's consumer protection policies. No more.

According to Direct Marketer, the five big highlights of the new rule are:

Continue reading "Cell Phone Text Messaging (SMS) Campaigns Watched by Direct Marketing Association" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on October 20, 2009 at 7:42 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

I just checked TweetDeck, the tool that I use to manage my Twitter accounts and noticed that Donald Trump sent out a tweet in which he mentioned me. Nice, I thought, if real. Fortunately, Twitter has added a verification tool so that high profile celebrities like The Donald can distinguish their actual accounts from those operated by impersonators. While looking into how that works, I noticed that Twitter offers what they refer to as a "badge." These are basically interactive widgets that you can post to your blog or any other web page so that your visitors can see your most recent tweets and easily follow you. Here's mine:

Continue reading "Twitter Verification" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on August 20, 2009 at 3:45 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

A handful of our fans alerted me over the past hour or so that six or seven scammy-looking jobs were running on our site and automatically sent out to our Twitter and Facebook accounts. It took an hour or so of back-and-forth with them to figure out which jobs they were concerned about but within a few minutes of receiving the links we reviewed the postings and are pulling them off of our site right now.

As best as we can tell right now, an ad agency misrepresented to us what jobs they wanted to post to our site. They're a well known and at least had been legitimate agency. It appears to me that they decided to cross the ethical line and post these, ahem, jobs to our site in order to make a quick buck at the expense of some of the millions of unemployed and under employed Americans who are suffering through the worst recession since the 1930's. The agency's name was no where to be found on the postings so they only stood to gain a few bucks and suffer no harm to their reputation. We made some money when we thought the postings would be legitimate and suffered some harm to our reputation but the real victims here are those who can least afford to be: the job seekers who may have been suckered into these "opportunities."

I just don't get how these scammers sleep at night. Actually, I hope they don't. Jerks.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on July 23, 2009 at 3:09 PM | Leave a Comment (1)

Anyone who has ever been in sales has experienced the customer who wants what you have to sell but isn't willing to pay full price for it. They can come up with a million reasons why they want it for less, but rarely can they come up with a good reason for how selling it to them for less benefits not only them but also you. And in business it is critical for buyer AND seller to benefit from the transaction...especially if they want to continue to do business.

Gregg Booth of Net-Temps sent to me a link to a great video that shows just how ludicrous these "give it to me for free this time and maybe I'll pay full price the next time" requests can be by moving the requests out of a business-to-business and into a business-to-consumer context.

Continue reading "Some Clients Ask for Too Much" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on June 18, 2009 at 10:27 AM | Leave a Comment (1)

We received a voice message yesterday from a man who identified himself as Robert and said he was a producer with a television show called, "The World's Greatest." He said that they're planning to do a television show that would take viewers behind the scenes of a leading job board and asked to speak with the appropriate person on our staff.

His message just didn't sound right so I Googled the phone number he left 561-819-0877 and found a bunch of links which identified his organization, Crown TV, as scammers. This appears to be one of those deals where they pose as journalists who are interested in doing a story on your organization and then after you've spent a lot of time with them they tell you that there are fees for them to shoot or air the story. No legitimate television or other media outlet charges the subject of a story.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on April 1, 2009 at 8:37 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

We received a voice message yesterday from a man who identified himself as Robert and said he was a producer with a television show called, "The World's Greatest." He said that they're planning to do a television show that would take viewers behind the scenes of a leading job board and asked to speak with the appropriate person on our staff.

His message just didn't sound right so I Googled the phone number he left 561-819-0877 and found a bunch of links which identified his organization, Crown TV, as scammers. This appears to be one of those deals where they pose as journalists who are interested in doing a story on your organization and then after you've spent a lot of time with them they tell you that there are fees for them to shoot or air the story. No legitimate television or other media outlet charges the subject of a story.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on April 1, 2009 at 8:37 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Before I got to know anyone at Monster, I couldn't stand the organization. They're an indirect competitor of ours but that wasn't it. It was the arrogance and the terrible stories that our clients would tell us about their condescending, sleazy, customer service. Then I met Neal Bruce at meetings of the International Association of Employment Web Sites and other recruiting conferences and I began to appreciate that not everyone who worked there was a scum bucket. In fact, most probably weren't. I actually found myself defending them and asking people to consider that Monster didn't deserve its bad reputation but got it from being Goliath in a world dominated by David-wannabees.

But today my attitude took a big u-turn. I was at the Minnesota Recruiters Unconference at the Best Buy world headquarters in Richfield, Minnesota. Josh Kahn, Paul DeBettignies, and I had the idea for this organization two years ago over two burritos and a bowl at Chipotle. Paul has by far been the driving force since then and thankfully so because he's done a masterful job. But all of Paul's great karma couldn't offset the disgusting performance of one of Monster's employees at the conference.

Continue reading "Monster.com Sales Rep Lies, Lies, Lies" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 27, 2009 at 9:20 PM | Leave a Comment (1)

Front page news in the Minneapolis newspapers over the past couple of days has been the killing of Katherine Ann Olson. While any murder is tragic, this one is noteworthy to employers and job seekers alike because it appears to be related to the victim's use of Craiglist to find a nanny position.

Ms. Olson was looking for a nanny job. She had successfully used Craigslist before and so searched it again. She found an ad of interest responded. She told her roommate that she was going to meet the family from the ad. After she didn't come home, police initiated a search and found her dead in the trunk of her car at a park in Burnsville, Minnesota late Friday night.

Continue reading "Craigslist Job Seeker Killed" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on October 29, 2007 at 9:43 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

New York state Attorney Generl Andrew Cuomo has launched an investigation into social networking site Facebook after New York undercover investigators posed as children as were allegedly solicited by sexual predators.

Cuomo said that agents posing as children were solicited by adult sexual predators and that the agents could easily access pornographic photos. Agents contacted Facebook but their complaints were often ignored. Facebook, to its credit, did take down some of the offending material and close the accounts of some of the predators but to its shame it apparently failed to do so on all and perhaps most of the time.

Facebook is only three years old. It was founded in 2004 in the dorm room of Harvard student, Mark Zuckerberg, and opened its site to everyone in 2006. The company says it now has more than 42 million users. Unfortunately, some of those users are scum and we should be thankful that Cuomo and his staff are working to keep this wonderful resource as safe as possible for all.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on September 26, 2007 at 5:23 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Interesting post today at Recruiting.com that warns candidates to be wary of scams under which candidates are convinced to pay for information about employment opportunities. While some will infer that means that you should never pay for a job and that's technically true, it also isn't quite that simple.

Continue reading "Pay for Employment" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 20, 2005 at 8:47 AM | Leave a Comment (0)