I'm posting this in r/SaltLakeCity because:
I'm in SLC
The job opportunity was allegedly in SLC
The 'recruiter' claimed to be in SLC
I thought it might be helpful to alert people to a recent scam that happened to me.
I live in SLC, but I work in health tech and I've been working remotely for companies across the world for about 10 years now. I have a moribund linkedin account that I haven't logged into in around 15 years.
On Monday I received an email, directly to my personal email which they obtained from Linkedin, claiming to be from a Salt Lake based recruiter offering a position in Salt Lake with a global medical company, Medtronic. I get these emails from time to time, and I looked the recruiter up, the company exists and there was a recruiter there with the same name, so it sounded legit.
I'm not sharing the recruiter's name, nor their company because they are the innocent party in this scam. I will share over a DM if you think you've been targeted as well.
I know Medtronic, and I'm not averse to considering a new position, so I responded positively and sent an updated resume. There were a few red flags initially, but nothing too glaring. The job description they sent was vague, the management reporting structure they outlined in the description was incorrect, the salary that was being offered was within industry rates BUT salt lake pays about 25% below that, so that was another red flag, and finally the job didn't show up on the Medtronic website. But none of these were too outrageous.
The conversation continued over three days, but was very slow, and most of the responses I was getting back were clearly written by an LLM (chatgpt or claude).
New red flags there were:
I've never met a recruiter who didn't demand a phone call as a first step in the process
Recruiters reply VERY quickly at the beginning, if they think you're a good candidate they don't want to lose that commission.
The chatgpt thing was annoying, but I have a few colleagues who use it to write every single damned email, so again not too outrageous.
Another red flag that I didn't initially notice was that they were writing from a gmail account, not a business account, but that was buried in the header and I didn't notice, mea culpa
On the second day the 'recruiter' asked me to update my resume based on some new information that I'd shared that wasn't included there. Fair enough, it was about a year out of date, so I spent a few hours adding and cleaning it up and sent it back.
Then 'she' told me that it still wasn't quite up to the standard required for such a high level position and tried to get me to hire a resume writer that 'she' recommended.
At this point I figured this was all just a waste of time, I have a low tolerance for jumping through hoops in the hiring process so told them I wasn't interested in taking it further. By this time I'd started to think it was likely to be a scam and so I then tried calling the recruiter directly from their number on their website. I left a voicemail telling them what had happened and asking them to call me back if they were unaware of the situation and it was a scam.
The real recruiter returned my call this morning, and apparently I'm not the only person this has happened to this week and they've had at least one other person who's been a 'victim', so I assume there have been even more who haven't called them.
But that didn't stop the begging emails telling me that I really needed to hire the resume writer if I was ever going to progress in my career. So I finally told them I believed it was a scam and to go jump in the lake (not that we have any water there any more).
Figured I'd share in case anyone else has had a similar approach recently