Careerbuilder.com: Spam King of the Recession Age?

by Posted on Posted fromPotrero Hill SF

Like many Amer­i­cans these days, I’m hunt­ing for pos­i­tive cash­flow and inves­ti­gat­ing ways in which I can trade my time and effort for paper I can turn around and trade for food and lodg­ing and art sup­plies. And in this day and age, the way to do that is through a vari­ety of web­sites that con­nect job seek­ers with employers.

The high­est val­ue sites are ones where the employ­ers have to pay to look at a résumé. The log­ic is like the old days of cat­a­log mar­ket­ing where you had to send a dol­lar to get a wid­get cat­a­log. Often the sell­er would rebate the dol­lar with the first order, but in order to get the cat­a­log you had to show some ini­tia­tive and com­mit­ment. There are zil­lions of peo­ple out there who will take any­thing as long as it’s free, and there is a much small­er num­ber of peo­ple that will pay even a dol­lar for some­thing they don’t even want or have no more than a pass­ing curios­i­ty about. At the same time a dol­lar, espe­cial­ly if it comes off the first order, is a low enough bar­ri­er to entry that no one that seri­ous­ly wants your cat­a­log would stop at it.

After updat­ing my résumé on CareerBuilder.com, which is one of the big­ger job web­sites, I imme­di­ate­ly start­ed get­ting «inter­view offers» from com­pa­nies that were unre­lat­ed to any­thing that appears on my résumé. Here is a sample:

June 8, 2009

Dear Steven,

We have reviewed your resume on CareerBuilder.com and feel we may have an inter­est in sched­ul­ing you for an inter­view. Please take a moment to answer a brief ques­tion­naire (see the link below) that will fur­ther assist us in deter­min­ing if a pre­lim­i­nary match exists between your qual­i­fi­ca­tions and career objec­tives and our cor­po­rate goals.

Inter­views will be con­duct­ed in the San Fran­cis­co area on Mon­day of next week. To be clear, this posi­tion does NOT require a dai­ly commute.

PLEASE NOTE: You have been sent this email because we saw some­thing in your resume that would indi­cate to us a poten­tial fit for pro­fes­sion­al busi­ness to busi­ness sales.

If you feel we have made an error, there is no rea­son for you to click on the com­pat­i­bil­i­ty pro­file below. Please sim­ply scroll to the bot­tom of this email and click on the link to be per­ma­nent­ly removed from our selec­tion process.

Click below for our online com­pat­i­bil­i­ty ques­tion­naire: [REDACTED]

The Lion­heart Group, Inc. is unique­ly posi­tioned to attract, devel­op and retain pre­em­i­nent field and man­age­ment tal­ent in an emerg­ing indus­try char­ac­ter­ized by high-growth and min­i­mal com­pe­ti­tion. We spe­cial­ize in pro­vid­ing busi­ness own­ers and employ­ee groups of all sizes with cut­ting edge employ­ee ben­e­fits specif­i­cal­ly designed for iden­ti­ty theft restora­tion and access to the legal system.

We seek inde­pen­dent-mind­ed indi­vid­u­als with sol­id inter­per­son­al com­mu­ni­ca­tions skills to join our elite team of high­ly trained busi­ness to busi­ness sales pro­fes­sion­als. Our Agents can earn sub­stan­tial incomes mar­ket­ing our plans both as employ­ee ben­e­fits and as valu­able tools for busi­ness owners. 

This went on for sev­er­al more para­graphs, but it’s pret­ty clear that where they wrote «You have been sent this email because we saw some­thing in your resume» that «some­thing» was a con­tact email address and noth­ing more.

One of two things is true: either CareerBuilder.com is sell­ing email address­es in bulk (which I think would vio­late the terms of ser­vice) or $600 for two weeks is too low a bar­ri­er of entry to pre­vent mul­ti-lev­el-mar­keters and Ponzi scam­mers from scrap­ing up all the email address­es of all résumés they can get and send­ing mass-mail­ings to every­one who is look­ing for any job.

It gets worse, too. Some of these «offers» are in bro­ken Eng­lish and car­ry the ear­marks of the famous Niger­ian email scams:

Our part time work propo­si­tion pro­vides you with sup­ple­men­tal wages which depends on your per­cent, and is rather competitive.

You have a pos­si­bil­i­ty to earn $700‑1400 per week.

Requirements:

  • Com­put­er and Inter­net skills
  • Age 21 and older
  • Good Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Skills
  • check­ing account

If CareerBuilder.com can­not do a bet­ter job of weed­ing out «employ­ers» who are look­ing not for work­ers but for marks, then they should­n’t be get­ting the busi­ness of indi­vid­u­als with actu­al skills who are seek­ing to make them­selves avail­able to be employed.

Published by splicer

17 Replies to “Careerbuilder.com: Spam King of the Recession Age?”

    1. No Kid­ding.

      I’m also see­ing a num­ber of canned emails sim­i­lar to the first one. Is it real­ly com­mon nowa­days for com­pa­nies not to con­tact indi­vid­u­als with some kind of request for more infor­ma­tion or a phone inter­view but just invite us to an «employ­ment sem­i­nar» by which I take to mean «cat­tle call»? 

  2. Job Boards & Scam emails

    I remem­ber when, as a recruiter, I bought my first Career­buil­dr & HotJobs sub­scrip­tion. They just about asked for a blood sam­ple to prove that I had a legit­i­mate com­pa­ny. My impres­sion is that they are either not vet­ting these peo­ple as well any­more or they sim­ply don’t care because they need the rev­enue. I tell all my read­ers to use them only as research tools…nothing more.

  3. I have noticed a few spams
    I have noticed a few spams like that, but my spam fil­ters usu­al­ly catch them. 

    What they don’t catch is a “look-alike” email from click.careerbuilder-email.com which appears to poor­ly dupli­cate the nor­mal careerbuilder.com email. How­ev­er, every link and image on the page leads to a data­base con­nec­tion, pre­sum­ably to track the emails of who clicks, so I refuse to view the images or click on any of the links, so it appears to them as if I’ve nev­er opened the email. 

    I’ve always won­dered if it was indeed spam, and in that not know­ing, I’ve just put them aside and not reg­is­tered it with the inter­net spam cops. But now, I’ve closed the careerbuilder.com account, and the click.careerbuilder-email.com is still com­ing, so I am pret­ty sure it’s a fake domain look-alike spam.

    Sad­ly though, valid tar­get­ed email address­es are worth quite a bit of mon­ey to mar­ket­ing folks, so per­haps it’s cheap for them to get a paid sub­scrip­tion to some­thing like career­builder and cull it for emails.

  4. Not Sure If This Counts

    I received an email recent­ly from some­one pos­ing as a Career­Builder user seek­ing employ­ees, but there was noth­ing bla­tant­ly scream­ing “scam” in the email body. The con­tent was writ­ten well and the request nev­er asked for a check­ing account or any­thing of the sort. It only asked for a name, zip and email address.

    The thing that gets me is that I don’t even have an account on careerbuilder.com and to make sure of it, I went to careerbuilder.com, went to login and clicked on “for­got pass­word”. The web­site con­firmed this when it said that email address was not on file. After con­firm­ing that I’ve nev­er used Career­Builder, I emailed the per­son back and said “I’ve nev­er used careerbuilder.com, there­fore this email is fake.”

    Here is the email in question:

    Good morn­ing,

    SCF com­pa­ny (U.S.), leader of part time oppor­tu­ni­ty’s is pleased to offer you a job.
    We are cur­rent­ly hir­ing for sev­er­al posi­tions.  All posi­tions are ENTRY LEVEL and require no expe­ri­ence.
    Cur­rent­ly, We are look­ing for project accoun­tants to work on a part time con­tract assign­ment, 20 – 30 hours/week with our US clients.

    This is a part-time and home based posi­tion.
    You can work direct­ly from the house or office

    Com­pen­sa­tion 1,600.00 — 1,900.00/month

    Require­ments:
    # Col­lege grad­u­ate
    # Abil­i­ty to cre­ate a good admin­is­tra­tion inter­com­mu­ni­ca­tion
    # Should have good leader skills and be polite and tact­ful
    # Age — from 21 years old

    To apply, please pro­vide your Name, Zip and Email.

    Thank you, have nice day!
    Sin­cere­ly, Christo­pher Lay­ton,
    SCF Hir­ing Man­ag­er.
    manager@starcapitalfinance.net

  5. Looks like s[c|p]am to me

    Nor­mal­ly I would have edit­ed the email address out of your post, but hey, if spam­mers find that address when they’re scrap­ing the Web for email address­es, so be it.

    My guess is that it is some sort of pyra­mid scheme if not a lure to get peo­ple to pur­chase a «train­ing» or «set-up» kit of some sort, think­ing that there’s actu­al income attached to it some­how. Also the irreg­u­lar­i­ties in the Eng­lish sug­gest an off-shore scam. Legit­i­mate com­pa­nies should have prop­er Eng­lish in their mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions. The domain in his email is reg­is­tered to a ser­vice that masks the reg­is­tran­t’s infor­ma­tion, but these days that does­n’t mean a whole lot. You can’t get my per­son­al email and phone num­ber out of splicer.com’s reg­is­tra­tion any longer. 

    I only hope that you did­n’t use your own reg­u­lar email address to write back to these peo­ple. The whole strat­e­gy may be to col­lect email address­es con­nect­ed to real peo­ple. You may have found your way to get­ting more spam.

  6. Career builder (mass appeal jobs) spam to me

    “Look­ing for ded­i­cat­ed, dri­ven pro­fes­sion­als who desire a career in Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy. Our clients and hir­ing part­ners have mul­ti­ple entry to mid-lev­el Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy posi­tions to fill in their help desk, PC/Network repair, and desk­top depart­ments. We are also look­ing for ener­getic deploy­ment tech­ni­cians to sat­is­fy large projects through­out the New York area”  THESE ARE SCAMSPAM!!!

    1. no con­tact info   2. no “real” com­pa­ny men­tioned 3. the “loca­tions” are not known. 4. Because it is says “mul­ti­ple entry to mid-lev­el” (that is the appeal) that is spread­ing the net real wide! so a mass of folks will sub­mit your resume info!    LOOK out for the “mass appeal” lines.

    These guys are slick! 

  7. Career­builder

    I have over 20 years expe­ri­ence and have not been able to get one job out of career­builder for 1 1/2 years. i’ve paid them twice for sup­posed resume dis­tri­b­u­tion and noth­ing! All I’ve received so far has been false adver­tise­ment by recruiters, scam artists, and thieves who use your infor­ma­tion to scam you out of mon­ey or sell your info to adver­tiz­ers. This coun­try has gone to shit because of these greedy scumbags.

     

  8. Career­builder
    I’ve had a hand­ful of inter­views from Career­builder. They’ve always been jobs that were post­ed in the paper then pulled onto CB website.
    I had one inter­view last year but it’s SO hard to weed thru all the spam to get to an actu­al job post!

  9. Career­builder
    I found this web page by search­ing for careerbuilder-email.com.

    I’ve nev­er post­ed my résumé on Career­builder, but did reg­is­ter with them in order to get cus­tomized search e‑mails. How­ev­er, both the e‑mail and phys­i­cal address that I used were unique to Career­builder. Any e‑mail sent to that address could only come from Careerbuilder. 

    Today, after sev­er­al months of only receiv­ing search relat­ed e‑mail, I found a look-alike mes­sage with lots of links, all point­ing to click.careerbuilder-email.com. Even worse than the spam, was the fact that the mes­sage was cus­tomized to the phys­i­cal geo­graph­i­cal area that I used when reg­is­ter­ing with Careerbuilder.

    From this, I have to pre­sume that Career­builder either sold _all_ of my con­tact info, or they’ve been hacked. IMHO, both are pret­ty bad.

    1. Com­pa­nies spoof­ing themselves

      Since careerbuilder-email.com’s whois entry points some­where oth­er than Career­builder LLC, I’d say you’re absolute­ly right to be sus­pi­cious. How­ev­er, careerbuilder-email.com’s par­ent com­pa­ny Exact­Tar­get is based in Indi­ana and lists Career­Builder as a client of theirs. Being that they are in the USA I’d say they’d be shut down rather fast if Career­Builder had­n’t actu­al­ly con­tract­ed them to do their mailing.

      It is beyond me why large com­pa­nies allow emails to go out from oth­er domains under their name. If I get an email from «attsurveys.com» my first assump­tion is that it has noth­ing to do with AT&T and I throw it away. I under­stand why com­pa­nies will sub­con­tract their email cam­paigns, but if they can’t at least assign a sub­do­main of their own to the project, they’re just mak­ing phish­ing eas­i­er for every­one. I’ve even got­ten emails from my bank that were real legit­i­mate emails that did­n’t come from their own domain. These are com­pa­nies with six, sev­en, even eight-fig­ure IT bud­gets. How can they be so stupid?

      1. wow! me too… just today…

        I just got some spam today from Career­builder. My first. 

        But I have ~nev­er~ used their site. I haven’t opt­ed in. The only spam I have received through Exact Tar­get that I’ve noticed was to my old work email (by the way, they were a cus­tomer of ours at the time as well).

        This smells of a des­per­ate com­pa­ny upping their email mar­ket­ing dur­ing depress­ing eco­nom­ic times.

      2. it’s all Big Business

        > It is beyond me why large com­pa­nies allow emails to go out from oth­er domains under their name.

        what makes you think they allow? some­one wins big prize, domain called attsurveys.com, and next day starts send­ing spam pre­tend­ing to be relat­ed to at&t. The real at&t isn’t even aware.

        Or anoth­er scheme, they pay at&t, or your bank, some fee, maybe become part­ner or some­thing, and then go ahead with their pitch. There it all depends on how well at&t or bank is over­see­ing their “part­ners”.

        In the cir­cles that have no real prod­uct, peo­ple become very cre­ative about the ways to scam oth­ers. They are run­ning schemes nor­mal human being won’t even think about, they sub­con­tract on 10 lev­els… today you make a call to tech sup­port of at&t that is sub­con­tract­ed to call cen­ter in India, tomor­row you receive from Chi­na a sur­vey about yes­ter­day’s call to India, and 5 oth­er firms were involved in the process of trans­fer­ing the infor­ma­tion. It’s all mul­ti-bil­lion dol­lar busi­ness and employs lots of par­a­sites world­wide. At the same time the 2nd pack of the par­a­sites, mul­ti-tril­lion-dol­lar indus­try, is pro­tect­ing the 1st one from the ter­ror­ists, and yet the 3rd one, also mul­ti-bil­lion-dol­lar indus­try, insures their lia­bil­i­ty to each oth­er. It’s all called Cor­po­rate America.

         

         

        1. Those are two different

          Those are two dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions you describe. The first, one person/company fraud­u­lent­ly rep­re­sent­ing them­selves as anoth­er com­pa­ny, is not what I’m talk­ing about. How­ev­er, it is so com­mon that I would think that most com­pa­nies that actu­al­ly want to send out sur­veys and get results would try to avoid the appear­ance that their mails were com­ing from a third-par­ty pre­tend­ing to be them.

          Sure, tasks like sur­veys get sub­con­tract­ed and sub-sub­con­tract­ed, but there is no rea­son that those con­trac­tors can­not send their sur­veys through the client com­pa­ny’s mailservers from the client com­pa­ny’s email addresses.

          In this instance, I’m not talk­ing about a case where, as you say, the com­pa­ny was­n’t even aware of the sur­vey. I took pains to deter­mine that the first com­pa­ny actu­al­ly paid mon­ey to the sec­ond com­pa­ny in order to gath­er the infor­ma­tion from their customers.

          It’s not greed or decep­tion I’m sur­prised at; it’s the clum­sy and pre­ventable appear­ance of deception.

          Oh, and I used a bad exam­ple. attsurveys.com looks like it has noth­ing at all to do with AT&T. It looks like it’s being offered for sale though. Maybe I should get into the phish­ing business?

  10. Career­builder Spam

    The vol­ume of spam and phone calls from plac­ing my resume on Career­builder is redicu­lous.  All career­builder is a method to har­vest phone num­bers and email address­es from peo­ple look­ing for a job.  I delet­ed th my pro­file and resume,  and I am still get­ting annoy­ing calls that have noth­ing to do with my cho­sen field!  Stay away!

     

     

  11. CareerBuilder=CareerDestroyer

    Career­Builder was the main web­site I used to sub­mit over 100 resumes start­ing a year ago and nev­er got any response oth­er than form let­ters stat­ing that anoth­er can­di­date was bet­ter qual­i­fied. I don’t know how employ­ers dis­cer­tain resume infor­ma­tion once it is received but some­thing is not right.  Final­ly I start­ed using Craigslist and lo and behold, I start­ed get­ting phone calls back left to right.  With­in four weeks, I had over sev­en inter­views and was offered three dif­fer­ent jobs.  If I would have used craigslist a year ago, I could have been work­ing instead of receiv­ing unem­ploy­ment, which thank God, was a bless­ing, because I would have lost my home. Career­Builder is a joke and I think there are a lot of peo­ple out there, right now, that don’t real­ize they are depend­ing upon or rely­ing on this web­site to bring them a con­nec­tion to a job that they will nev­er get. Sad, sad, sad…

  12. Spam Oper­a­tion

    Axiom #1: noth­ing but spam comes in response to post­ing resume on careerbuilder

    Axiom #2: any­thing sub­mit­ted in response to career­builder job post­ings has zero chance of response,

    Lem­ma 2a, con­se­quence of Axiom #2: job post­ings on career­builder are spam as well.

    Ergo: Career­builder is spam operation.

     

     

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