The Clever Shark

A follow-up on my bug report about the CRA careers site

A couple of weeks ago I reported that there was a bug on the Canada Revenue Agency web site. To recap, if you just go to the CRA site, follow the link to “Job Opportunities”, and then click on the candidate registration link, you get an error message: “the session has expired”. And if you try and repeat the process, you get a different error message. Basically it seems impossible to register as a candidate for jobs through the CRA web site.

Oddly enough yesterday I figured out how to get around that problem, more on that later. But earlier today, at 3:09am, I got a github message about it. It seems that someone did in fact look at my article, probably from seeing it posted on LinkedIn, and at least tried it out. Now this brings up the interesting question as to whether the Canadian federal government is outsourcing its IT work to India, because 3am is not considered “working hours” anywhere in Canada, but that’s a question for another day.

Here’s a screenshot of the message I got:

github follow-up

First of all, thanks for confirming it’s a bug. But it’s disappointingly lazy to say “well, it’s not my job” in response. It’s a bug that affects the usability of the site, it shouldn’t just get closed (which it did), and if it’s “not your job” it really should be passed along to the people whose job it is to fix it.

Secondly, it’s not even a difficult bug to figure out, and I know that because I figured it out by myself yesterday. And I’m not even getting paid to do this. Which is even more annoying, speaking as someone who’s been looking for a job in the IT field for 8 months now and will probably have to go work on the shop floor at Costco because the tech job market is absolute shite at the moment in Montreal (mind you, if you do have to work in a retail establishment, Costco is the gold standard there).

But, let’s get back to the matter at hand.

It’s the “candidate registration” page that’s broken. It simply will not work if you didn’t sign in to the CRA careers site before you get to it. If you go to the CRA Careers site you will see this near the top of the page:

Click on the “Sign in or register” link, sign in through your authentication partner (or CRA ID), and THEN click on the “candidate registration” link, and you will be able to fill out your candidate profile.

The easiest way to fix this would be to disable the fields in the “candidate registration” landing page if the user is not logged in, and inform the user that they must be logged in before continuing.

However, it appears that the web dev teams at the CRA operate in silos, where each team is responsible for small individual parts of the site while remaining blissfully unaware of what the other teams are doing. Those teams are probably offshore, working for different companies, and have no clear way of communicating with one another. I don’t know what happened to the “Canada First” and “Elbows up” attitude that the Prime Minister keeps talking about, but it doesn’t seem to apply to IT work done for the federal government. That’s a shame, because there are thousands of Canadian IT workers currently desperately looking for jobs, running through their EI, and eventually forced to apply for welfare at the provincial level. If I’d been in that same situation 20 years ago I would have just looked for employment in the USA, or somewhere else in the world, but that’s no longer an acceptable (in the case of the USA) or even possible option for a guy my age.

So, CRA, I’ve figured it out for you. Fix your damned web site!

An experiment in hiring in 2026 – an epilogue

I thought that the little experiment in recruitment fraud finding, which I started on Sunday, would be done and over after yesterday’s update, but as it turns out there was more to uncover.

Checking my email this morning I found three more emails in my inbox! Each one as dodgy as the four I already mentioned.

One of them came to me from someone claiming to be from the “Robert Walters” recruitment agency, but the domain of the email was “robertwaltters.com”. Which obviously is a typosquatting tactic that works if you don’t pay attention to these “little” details.

Another came from a Gmail account, but a very funny one. The account that originated the scam was [name].[company].sgourmetpizzaa@gmail.com. I mean, come on. This guy was barely even trying. The interesting thing is that this came as a message that used Gmail “Confidential Mode”, which I thought was a scam until I read up on it and found that it actually exists. Nevertheless the only people I’ve seen using that feature are recruitment scammers, so I must add it to the already long list of “tells” of recruitment scams.

The third also came to me via Gmail “Confidential Mode”, and claimed to be from Northrop Grumman. Now that is a big company involved in aviation, so why would they be relying on free gmail addresses? FWIW the address they used was [lastname].[firstname].northrop.grumman@gmail.com.

So, stay vigilant my employment-seeking friends. The vultures out there know there are lots of bodies ripe for pickin’. In more positive news I did score an interview tomorrow. For Costco. I haven’t worked there for 35 years, but hey, it’s a job.

An experiment in hiring in 2026: the unsurprising conclusion

See part 1 of this exciting experiment here!

Unsurprisingly, all four “new connection” recuiters turned out to be scammers. I noticed that 3 of them no longer have LinkedIn accounts, and I just reported the fourth one.

The game is this: these “people” (probably AI bots) pretend to be “independent recruiters” who have a job you’d be interested in. This can be sniffed easily enough from your profile. They give you a little spiel about they’re impressed by your qualifications and experience and you’re almost sure to get the job… BUT they want to make sure you get picked and your resume could use improvement! And of course they know someone who can do this, for a fee.

What are the tells? Just look at the profile. Low number of connections (for a recruiter in this economy?), their email is a free account (gmail, outlook, yahoo), often they don’t appear in the “recruitment firm” they claim to work at but they follow that company, sometimes they’ll redirect you away from Linkedin messaging and onto a proper custom-domained email account… that’s also a free email account. 1/4 of the candidates in my experiment did this, and probably just didn’t know that Yahoo mail adds branding to the emails they send. Also the custom domain had no web site. For a recruiter. In 2026.

They’ll also be as impatient as a Nigerian scammer — if you don’t answer quickly they’ll keep pinging you on Linkedin, and send reminder emails that say stuff like “looking forward to your feedback”. 2/4 of the scammers “suggested” resume optimization within 2 hours. One of them even showed that my resume had an ATS score of 39%… when all the ATS checkers I used showed high 60s to low 70s.

So, yeah. Looking for a job makes you a huge target for scammers on Linkedin. But at least Linkedin seems to be doing something about it, or at least acting on the reports they get, even on a long weekend. So, there’s something positive to get out of this.

Ultimately, if something seems just a little too good to be true, it’s because it is. The tech job market is absolute shit right now and it’s not about to get better.

An experiment in hiring in 2026

See the exciting conclusion of this experiment here!

I’ve now been looking for employment for 8 months, after 4 month of unemployment last year and an unsuccessful stint at a job I had not applied for but been offered by the manager in charge, which turned out to be a complete shit show. So, I’ve come to know a lot about how companies hire — or, more exactly, DON’T hire — candidates at this time in history.

Along the way I’ve come across a number of sus “recruiters” who take it on themselves to string candidates along, promising jobs that pay a little too well, and try to sell you on “resume reviews” costing hundreds of dollars, while not really having any access or say in hiring decisions and probably not even being recruiters. Now, the thing about scams is that they tend to follow patterns. This is not a field of creative geniuses, and they have a number of tells.

So today I went to LinkedIn, posted a video entitled “Yes, You ARE Getting Auto-Rejected” which is apparently causing a whole lot of controversy in the HR community. A mere minutes later I was contacted by FOUR people claiming to be recruiters who have a job for me. One of them was for a job I had already applied for at the target company, so it’ll be interesting to see what comes from that. Two more advertised a job I had seen in my local job searches but was not a good fit for me for certain specific reasons.

Well, I decided to take the bait and send all four of them my resume, which has already been optimized by Claude AI for ATS performance. As things progress I’ll make follow-ups to track the progress of these “applications”. So, stay tuned.

Ghost jobs – old and busted. Ghost interviews – new hotness?

Ghost jobs are a thing, but this week I had a… ghost interview.

Got a call last week about a job for which I had applied. Got a screening interview scheduled on Monday (August 24th) and was amped up for it. It was a Teams call, so I sign on 5 minutes before the interview, and waited.

And waited, and waited. No one else came on the call. I asked in the meeting chat whether the call was mis-scheduled — the person who created the meeting was in Kansas but the other person invited to the meeting was in my time zone. I also emailed the person who booked the meeting. So, not having anything else to do, I waited and browsed the internet during that time. An hour passed, then another 15 minutes, and I signed out.

I then emailed both persons in the meeting to inform them of this and said I was open to rescheduling the meeting anytime this week. I then received an automated response saying the other person on the call was on vacation until Tuesday.

However it’s now been two days and no response. Yes, I checked my “spam” folders just in case. This is not a small company, this is a major company in Canada with a sizeable presence in the USA as well.

It strikes me as rather bizarre that a company would call me to schedule a meeting and then ghost me. It seems really unprofessional. And, for me, quite depressing.