Monday, December 8, 2008

The ghost of posts past

I received a notification late last week that I had a new comment on a blog post I wrote back in August . . . this particular blog post is one of my most-visited and prompted two follow-up posts--one later that month and one in October.

Allow me to summarize for you if you don't feel like following the links to the old posts: I responded to a Craigslist ad for some project work only to get a canned response (with a typo) telling me to upload my resume to postresumehere.com. I was suspicious, and said so. I received a handful of comments from people who received the same auto-response and were equally suspicious, and the post was viewed by dozens of others who didn't comment (all found my post after doing some type of search engine search for postresumehere.com). In the first follow-up post, I admitted to getting fooled a second time, and in the October post I wrote about my concerns about the value and/or validity of postresumehere.com.

When I first read the comment, I thought the anonymous author actually was the person responsible for the offending Craigslist ad, but after a few reads I wonder if they are just another recipient of the auto response who wanted to let me know that while the game is still afoot, at least the typo had been fixed:
The typo about they/their on the auto reply has been fixed.

I've set up a separate Gmail account for Craigslist and a couple of blogs. I give my qualifications in general terms and let them know that due to the fraud on Craigslist, I will respond with complete information after they provide information and I can research. Why would you forward a complete resume right away, knowing that scum are out there?

I found your blog while researching postresumehere.com tonight.
Why would I forward my resume when responding to an ad on Craigslist? Because I was looking for project work and assumed the ad was legit. Silly me. I'll not make that mistake again, I assure you.

1 comment:

Lori said...

I'm not sure why the anonymous emailer would think sending a resume is a bad thing? I'm scratching my head too, Amie. I've sent my resume to the same type of employers. Why wouldn't you?

I think the screening process is good, but I wonder how many legitimate people this person offended by requiring further information. Still, it's easy enough to convey the reason in a cordial way, I suppose.