Instead of tucking away that excitement, we recommend you treat the recruiter as you would anyone else sliding into your direct messages.

If you’ve been actively looking for a new job opportunity, it’s hard not to get excited when a recruiter reaches out to you. The fact that hiring candidates and new employees may not have met their colleagues in person yet makes them particularly vulnerable to these scams. With workers changing jobs at such a high rate, scammers spotted a massive potential pool of victims-and an opportunity to take advantage of hybrid working models and virtual hiring processes. And they’re not the only ones: 41% of workers worldwide admit they’re ready to leave their jobs. The pandemic-induced Great Resignation saw 3.9 million people quit their jobs in June 2021 ALONE. With technology advancement and social media at everyone’s fingertips, scams are becoming more and more elaborate. In some cases, they’ve even asked for payment. A few scammers were also reported to have conducted online interviews and offered jobs on behalf of Hootsuite in order to gain access to victims’ personal information such as Social Security/Social Insurance numbers, bank account info, and addresses. Scammers are using Hootsuite branding on fake social media profiles to legitimize their conversations with these individuals. Recently, we’ve had an influx of reports about scammers preying on potential candidates by impersonating Hootsuite recruiters and hiring managers. Companies like Shopify, Google, and Amazon have all been targeted, and unfortunately, Hootsuite isn’t immune either. Particularly in the tech space, HR impersonation scams have become more and more prevalent. Real HR employees are being impersonated in fictitious job offers sent on LinkedIn, in a scheme to ultimately get targets to share confidential information. The novelty of these scams is that the threat has expanded past emails and permeated into social and 1:1 messaging-mediums where scammers can impersonate corporate recruiters with ease. Impersonation scams aren’t new they’re a tried and tested way for scammers to do what they do best: weasel their way into your pockets and get access to your valuable personal information.

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