DeeDee Doke

Scams aimed at defrauding the recruitment industry and jobseekers may increase as a result of the current economic troubles, Jobsite chief executive Keith Potts has warned.

Speaking to Recruiter at the launch of the recruitment counter-fraud forum SAFER (Safe Advice for Employment and Recruitment), Potts said: “With this recession, there will be more people doing the scamming because they’ll be out of work. Everybody’s trying to survive, and there will be more bad practice, and more illegal scams.”

Identity fraud and internet scams that target naive jobseekers are already taking a toll on the UK recruitment industry and its users — but industry leaders, with help from the Metropolitan Police, are fighting back with SAFER.

The launch was hosted by the Met, whose Operation Sterling is intended to combat economic crime through partnership. Those attending the event included Paul Wilson, writer and producer of BBC Three’s The Real Hustle, a galaxy of senior recruiters and police from as far away as Australia and Canada.

The idea behind the forum is to bring recruiters together to share information that will help them protect their businesses, as well as clients and candidates, from being victimised by fraudsters.

“While we’ve got some heavy players sitting around the table, it’s important that local agencies understand that this is where we can help them,” Lee Graham, head of commercial management at Manpower in the UK, told Recruiter.

“The last 12 months have been spent talking about what can we do and how can we take this forward as a collective, rather than just in our silos,” Graham continued. “Now we’ve got to this point — what a great team this is. We want more to come in, but we’ve got to get the message out there to the marketplace: this is what we’ve got, guys, how can you help us and build this up?”

“Recruiters have massive, massive issues to deal with,” said Brian Varley, chief executive of executivesontheweb.com and one of the launch speakers.

However, the problems facing job boards and agencies are “two different things”, Varley said. “With job boards, it’s about money. With agencies, it’s about people.”

Job boards become a vehicle for scammers to obtain banking details and sometimes cash from unwary job seekers via fake job ads, training companies and CV writing firms.

Agencies find themselves in the position of having to detect fraudulent identity documents and ward off efforts by ill-intentioned job seekers to infiltrate targeted organisations where they can gain access to sensitive financial information.

“We’ve had a number of low-level, small-scale challenges with fraud,” acknowledged Chris Moore, Kelly Services’ managing director for the UK and Ireland.

“Some of the challenges we’ve had have been around contact centres and contact centres associated with some of the financial institutions,” Moore told Recruiter. “But the more you specialise in those sectors, the more you become acclimatised to spotting some of the risks; you also have to have consistent processes in place to make sure that those opportunities are limited.” Job board totaljobs group has put into place a ‘Jobs Police’, whose job it is to police jobs placed on the site. “We take them down immediately if we think anything untoward is going on,” said Shobhan Gajjar, totaljobs’ chief operating officer.

“I wouldn’t say that it’s a massive problem for us,” Gajjar told Recruiter. “But I think it’s a very real issue that confronts all of the job board businesses, as well as the wider public and industry at large.”

Jobsite’s Potts told Recruiter that his job sites were investing in technology to thwart fake ads. Yet several key points can alert people to the likelihood that the ad is not what it first appears to be. “There are quite a few we’re not comfortable with, and we won’t take the ad,” Potts said. “We know what a real vacancy looks like.

“We want to see a location on there, postcodes, salaries and we want to see if it’s an ‘over-promise’,” Potts continued. “These guys want to catch a lot of people with one ad. It’s adverts that simply look too good to be true.”

For more information, visit www.safer-jobs.com