Know Your Recruiter

KYR = Know Your Recruiter.

My two most popular LinkedIn posts over the last two weeks discussed scammy SMS texts I received from people who claimed to work for Randstad and Indeed but clearly did NOT.

THIS post clearly won’t garner tens of thousands of impressions, but it’s much more important: how do you differentiate a real recruiter from a fake one?

The easiest test—which all the fake recruiters fail—is to ask the recruiter to provide their corporate email address. But even that can backfire when the fake provides an email from an ALMOST good domain such as endeede.com and hopes the mark doesn’t notice the difference.

There are other tests, but my “biometric product marketing expert” preferred tests such as comparing a live PAD#-tested selfie against a driver’s license don’t prove anything. Sure, such methods can prove that Anna Morgan is Anna Morgan, but they don’t prove her profession per se (fractional talent acquisition leader / recruiter / career coach).

So for now the best KYR tactic is to ask for a corporate email address. Definitely don’t take the recruiting conversation to Telegram.

# PAD = presentation attack detection. A presentation attack is when you substitute a fake face (or another fake, such as a fake driver’s license) for a real one.

AI image by Microsoft Copilot because Google Gemini still won’t draw people.