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LNCtips.com: Whole Lot of Fakin' Goin' On

Legitimate recruiters perform a valuable service helping legal nurse consultants find jobs in law firms.  However, there has been a flurry of "recruiters" posting LNC "jobs" on certain legal nurse consultant groups on LinkedIn.  Don't be taken in by these scamsters, and don't send them your resume.  I'll tell you how to identify them, and what actions to take when you do.  To paraphrase Jerry Lee Lewis, there's a whole lot of fakin' goin' on

First, let's talk about sending your resume to a recruiter.  Your resume contains a lot of personal information that you don't want in the wrong hands.  This information includes your email address, phone numbers, and home address.  You don't want to send this information indiscriminately to people that you don't know. You need to take a few minutes to determine if the recruiter is legitimate or not.

Next, let's talk about real recruiters.  Legitimate recruiters make money by sending qualified applicants to their law firm clients.  If the client selects one of the applicants referred by the recruiter, the law firm pays the recruiter a percentage based on the applicant's salary.  For example, if the law firm hires the recruiter's applicant at a salary of $65,000 and the fee is 25%, the recruiter makes $16,250 for placing the applicant.

Recruiters often compete with other recruiters to place applicants for the same jobs.  That's why there's always a sense of urgency to recruiters' job postings.  Recruiters want you to contact them immediately before another recruiter fills the vacancy.  And speaking of contacting legitimate recruiters, they always include a phone number, email address, or both in their job postings.  Their LinkedIn profiles link to a legitimate company website and their photos look like real people, not models. 

Now for the fake "recruiters."  They all have some things in common.  Instead of asking you to contact them urgently, they provide a link to a generic website with nebulous job postings.  Most of the photos seem to be from a stock photo website, such as Shutterstock or Fotolia.  Many of the photos feature persons who appear to be models.  Each of them "likes" their own job posting discussion.

Click on the "recruiter's" profile and review the profile information.  I found something that looked "off" in almost every one.  For example, in one profile, the "recruiter" listed that she had a "Bachelor of Arts in Black Law Student Association."  Another one listed a "Bachelor of Science (BS), Practical Nursing, Vocational Nursing and Nursing Assistants" as her degree.

Check the photo on the job posting discussion and compare it to the "recruiter's" profile photo.  Some job postings present a photo that implies that it's a picture of the job poster.  However, when you click on his or her profile, there is no photo.  Real recruiters will use their photos in both the discussions and their profiles.

Check the "recruiter's" previous jobs and information about the positions to see if they are congruent.  Are the dates of employment clear?  Does the information in the job responsibilities match the position title?  The fakers look as if they cut job responsibilities from real resumes or job ads and pasted them into the imposters' profiles without much thought.  For example, in one's list of experiences, she indicates that she was nurse manager at an organization in California while simultaneously functioning as a staff RN at Montana State Prison.  She lists the prison as employing 1-10 employees in the graphic design industry. 

Google the "recruiter's" name and the name of his or her company.  Real recruiters and their companies will have a web presence beyond LinkedIn.  When you Google their phone numbers or email addresses, Google delivers a bunch of results.  The Google results for the fake recruiters will only show their LinkedIn profiles. 

To see if the degrees are accurate, you can contact the schools listed on the person's profile.  I didn't go that far, but I did check the license verification sites of states for two scamsters who claimed to be LPNs and RNs.  The state boards of nursing indicated that neither of them had an RN or LPN license.

If you determine the recruiter is real, submit your resume to the recruiter privately.  There's no need for the entire group to know that you're sending your resume. 

If you believe that a recruiter is an imposter, what can you do

1) Flag their postings as inappropriate.  To flag the discussion, click "Flag" under the discussion item (the job posting) and then select "Flag as Inappropriate."  The group manager receives the flag and is the only one who can remove the discussion.  According to Alice Adams of Medical Case Consultants  and manager of LinkedIn's Legal Nurse Consultant and Attorney Network group, dealing with misleading recruiters is a daunting task.  After deleting one of the fraudulent recruiters, another one quickly pops up in its place.

2) You can report the individual as a "Possible Inappropriate Profile" by clicking here.  This alerts LinkedIn to the fakers.

3) The easiest option is to go to the imposter's profile. In the bottom right of the border around the profile is a flag.  Click on the flag to report the profile.  Choose "Other" and report the profile as spam or as a fake profile. LinkedIn will suspend the account if enough people flag the profile.

Feel free to forward this to persons in your network or LinkedIn groups.  Let's all take a few minutes to check out recruiters to determine whether they're real or charlatans.  Then let's act to get rid of the imposters.  It's time to put an end to the whole lot of fakin' goin' on.

...Katy Jones