[UK] Up to 60% of jobs advertised on govt website are bogus

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...many of which are actually scams that con desperate people out of £65 for bogus criminal checks.

Meanwhile they accuse job seekers of being lazy and not trying hard enough while theres already more out of work than vacancies.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/un ... 60-3211592

I've heard of similar things in the US. Not so much the screening fees, but lots of the advertised jobs on various websites being bogus.

I've seen ads from employment agencies that charge a fee. I've heard they are rip offs. I guess you could call them headhunters.

Yeah, I think I must have applied for all of them at one point or another.

I actually told my advisor at the jobcentre when I was signing on, that it's all a con.

A lot of them are recruitment agencies that are getting money from the government when people sign up to them.

I'll tell you what, this country's gone to the f*****g dogs. And I'm not even joking, it makes me so f*****g mad.

Don't even get me started, I'm watching my favourite show on the telly. See ya!

It goes to show that there's no checks in place to verify a genuine company or not.

It to me particularly hurts genuine recruitment agencies that a lot of these scams don't declare the job, the company or any particular details, either under the name of a false recruitment agency or the a genuine agency would have no recollection of applying to the Job Centre.

If in doubt, always extensively research the company yourself. The Yellow Pages at least if the Internet provides no information.

the problem is that the con-dem government massaging figures to put a positive spin on the situation when things are far worse. They like to pretend there is a huge availability of work when they're clearly isn't because it gives them ammunition to point fingers and clamp down on the long term unemployed.

Its in the governments interests to turn a blind eye to cowboys and fly by night operations because if they didn't they would have nothing to lie about.

They use similar tactics in regards to the workfare participants, by including them in the employed population statistics ignorning the fact that they aren't even being paid minimum wage and by in large are on very temporary contracts.

We've had/we have the same problem here in the USA. It just isn't right.

On the one hand, you really don't want to make it difficult for job-offerers to post openings; the entire point is to make it easy for job seekers and job offerers to find each other. On the other hand, the easier it is for legitimate people, the easier it is for fraudsters.

Whenever you click on a connection link on Craigslist these days, you get a warning talking about the most common forms of fraud and the things that you should avoid doing over the internet with a complete stranger. At a bare minimum, the same thing should probably happen with the job sites. "Do not pay any money to anyone for background checks," for example.

I don't know anything about these govt jobs, but private job agencies typically have 0% of the jobs they advertised in newspaper / web etc as being available. Typically all they wanted was to get specialists (programmers etc) onto their books so that when something did come up they'd have people to offer to the potential employer straight away. The typical response of such employment agencies was "That job has gone now, but we'll have more similar ones soon...". There was never any question of background checks though; paid or otherwise - if an agency had asked for money it would have smelled like a con and I wouldn't have had anything to do with them.

Actually the position might have been vacant at once but filled very quickly because of high job demand and they don't put it on the website.
Once, I went to a place that advertised a really menial, ridiculous position as cashier in a thrift store and there was 100 people in line for that one lame job. This was when I was a teenager and I thought that kind of job would be fun. The guy doing the hiring started talking to this lady near the beginning of the line and they chewed the fat and she started going on and on about all the jobs she had at thrift stores and people they both knew. So bam it was filled just like that and there were still 90 people left in line. It was ridiculous to say the least but lots of people were hoping for work.

I have applied for some of these bogus jobs. I even printed a job off the job centre system and asked my adviser to call the number for me. I did this because I had already tried calling them but was told there is no such number by the phone network. After much reluctance to call the number my adviser eventually did and she got the same "no such number" automated message.

I also think the DWP are putting bogus jobs on there to trap claimants into applying just to see if we are making the effort to find work. I have had some dubious phone interviews and "invitations to apply" from their system.

I have read many other incidences online about other bogus jobs advertised by the universal jobmatch. And I believe it was a system set up to collect data about claimant behavior in order to sanction them.

Here are more reports on this issue

Channel 4 News

Guardian Newspaper

I would advise all claimants to take off their personal address and phone number details from their CV's on Universal Jobsite

It is very easy to submit bogus job ads to the Job Centre. A few years ago I was involved as part of an experiment to investigate this. A bogus company was set up and ads for two electronic engineering jobs were submitted to the Job Centre. If you didn't already know, you are more likely to find Elvis on the moon than an electronic engineering job at the Job Centre because very few companies advertise such jobs there. The technical requirements were quite high and required specialist knowledge - including familiarity with an obscure microcontroller, proficiency with GCC, and a preference for someone who could read and write Japanese - but the ads were accepted by the Job Centre without any quibble. The conclusion is that if such unusual highly technical jobs get onto the Job Centre database without any problems then it raises the question as to how many bogus ads for low skill jobs that the Job Centre staff are more familiar with are on the database at any time.

So many of the people involved in the jobcentre need to be executed. Whole system's backwards, so many of them are absolute scum. This is just one example of their stupidity and attempts to take advantage of the unfortunate. I'm probably more angry at them than the scammers themselves, because they can't BS me and say they didn't know, how the hell does something like this fly under their radar?

Not many people are aware that Winston Churchill was the man who established the Job Centre back in the years when he was in the Liberal Party. If it wasn't for WW2 and his 'finest hour' then it would probably have been his greatest achievement in life.

The Universal Jobmatch site has won an award!! !

Worst Onlne Recruitment Site Award