I was chatting with my eldest daughter, a software dev, last night and we got on the topic of LinkedIn recruiters.

Some of the tactics used by these people are familiar to anyone who’s been looking for a job:

• Ghost jobs: where you go through the work of chatting with a recruiter and submitting your resume/CV and in reality, there’s no job being offered.  It’s just a recruiter building up a database of future candidates.
• Fake urgency: “This job is closing soon!” Really? Let’s be honest, it’ll close as soon as you find the right candidate and not a moment sooner.  And if a company really does say “we’ll hire whoever we can find in two weeks” then you probably don’t want to be on team.
• Spray-and-Pray “Reach Outs”: I get these every week.  “Dear Sir, we think you’d be a wonderful candidate for a position we have open in Tokyo for an AS/400 developer…”  Oh really?  I live 10,000 miles away, don’t speak Japanese, and have never logged into an AS/400 system in my life.

Then there’s the actual interviewing experience:

• No salary details until very late in the process: Sure, getting down the final number isn’t the first thing you discuss, but there are plenty of people who’ve experienced going deep into a possible job discussion only to find out they’re miles apart on expectations.
• Please Do Some Free Work for Us: Here’s a problem we have, how would you solve it?  You prepare architectural diagrams or write actual code and then they decide not to choose you.  Thanks for the free work!
• Remote Bait-and-Switch: “100% remote” quickly turns into “our hybrid model requires you to be in the office three days a week.”

Etcetera.  A lot of this existed before LinkedIn did because recruiters have always been slimey.  Not all, sure, but that profession or perhaps its incentive structure does seem to have a lot of sketchy people.

And Now The Next Level

Over the last year, the Contagious Interview has emerged as a new threat.  It works like this:

• “Hi, we’re reaching out because here at Amazing Startup we are looking for a rock star developer and your might just fit the bill.  Are you interested?”
• “You are!  Great!  We’d like to verify your skills, so we’ve put together a test we ask all candidates to complete.  It’s a brief assignment that you will work through.  You can grab the work files at this link.  Please complete and return ASAP because we’re moving fast!”
• You, the supposed candidate, download the files, and read the README.txt.  You run npm install and…uh oh

There is no job, and now you’ve downloaded a crypto miner or God knows what.

Here’s one example.  Here’s another.

From the malicious actor’s point of view, it’s interesting to think about the economics.  Using AI for conversations, a single human could probably drive thousands of conversations.  After all, if you “reach out” to 100,000 people and 5,000 respond, probably all 5,000 are going to have some question – what’s the pay, is it really remote, etc.  So you use AI to answer those questions, and maybe 25% of the time, AI sounds like AI or makes a nonsense response, or maybe the percentage isn’t that high.  Even if it is, you’ve got 3,750 people to download and run your malware.

Be careful out there, people!

raindog308

raindog308 is a longtime community LETizen, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, raindog308 runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, raindog308 has a life-long love of German Shepherd Dogs, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, playing guitar, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.