Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Job scams aplenty

One of the first things I do when I get back from walking the dog after having breakfast is to settle into a two and a half hour average job search on the internet. 

I make up whatever coffee I need for the task, settle into my Poang chair, and bounce away while looking at web pages.  I have automated the task as much as possible, and I usually look at an average of 200 pages a day in that time. 

Granted it is not all job pages, I'm focused but not a robot.  After all, job search pages can be dry to put it mildly.

One of the things that the job boards all say is to not give away personal information when you post.  Or rather, Too Much Personal Information.  Bank account numbers, Social Security Numbers and the like are just too precious to post.  I had to make a determined decision on what to list.   I have a resume on three major job boards, Dice, Monster, and Careerbuilder, and they all have personal information.  I decided that if I were to find a job, I'd have to post what was publicly available.  The problem is that it means that I end up getting spammed daily.

Most of them are patently obvious that they are scams.   Job offers do not come from Hotmail.Com accounts.  Job offers certainly don't come from Hotmail.com accounts with a mismatched sender name.

Another problem is that jobs that sound like they may be interesting are either money laundering scams, or just "phishing" scams to get your personal information.  I get on the order of five jobs a day from scammers who want to get my information because they think that I would be a candidate for a "Payment Transfer Manager".  Yes, I also speak Nigerian tribal languages too.  Oh please let me give you my information so the little money I have saved up will feed your Yoruba village.

Not.

There are a lot of people in Job Recruiting who have some positions that are a great fit, but are trying a bit too hard to fill the position.   I've got a resume that says "Permanently Located in Greater Fort Lauderdale, Florida".  That means that I won't relocate.  Telecommuting would be a wonderful choice, and there are technologies that I am a Subject Matter Expert in that would lend themselves to sitting here and working at a company in Minneapolis or Bentonville Arkansas.  COBOL Programming is one of them.  Certain Mainframe Technologies like EZTrieve and JCL are two others.  I had gotten so many contacts from Walmart asking me if I wanted to relocate to Bentonville Arkansas to work on their mainframe for a while that hitting delete didn't do it. 

Thanks, but I'm really quite happy living in South Florida.   An occasional trip out of here will be fine, and I do say on my resume that some travel is acceptable.  Palm Trees are required, ice and snow is decidedly not.  As any of my friends or family could tell you, South Florida was the Mermaid on the Rocks that was calling to me like the Siren out of the old Greek Myths since I was 12.  This is where I belong.

The reality of the job market and where I am in my career combined with the depressed housing market are such that I could work in Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville or any other city South of the I-4 Corridor if I could telecommute 50% or more and buy a house in that city for the other two weeks for the cost of living in an extended stay hotel would.   Certainly would be worth it for me but none of those positions have come up.

I have also been contacted by one of the newpapers in San Francisco about writing for them but haven't really pursued it.  Writing for www.Examiner.com would be interesting, but the trick would be coming up with three pertinent topics that are interesting enough every week.  Writing for a blog is one thing, it serves as a brain-dump.  This blog is either a brain-dump or something that I've wanted to say to my beloved sister in New Jersey that came to mind.  I can blather on and if it makes no sense, the reader gets what they pay for.  I'm not certain my style is correct for that but we shall see.  The pay isn't great I've been told but I don't make a dime on this blog.

At any rate, it's time to start on that two-and-a-half hour epic.  I've got a mug of coffee to make while half of the 200 pages load.  Breaking things up was required, even my technical skills can't make Firefox load 200 pages quickly.

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