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.

The post An experiment in hiring in 2026 – an epilogue first appeared on The Clever Shark.

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.

The post An experiment in hiring in 2026: the unsurprising conclusion first appeared on The Clever Shark.

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.

The post An experiment in hiring in 2026 first appeared on The Clever Shark.

First, I went to the CRA web site and looked for the “careers” link.

I click on the Job opportunities link, which takes me to the careers page, where I see a Candidate Registration link, which I click.

In the resulting form I select that I’m a member of the general public, and click on the data privacy statement checkbox. So far, so good.

In this second Candidate Registration page (experienced UX writers will share my annoyance at having two consecutive pages with the same name, but let’s ignore that) I enter the appropriate data and click on the Next button.

And voila! an error message. “The session has timed out”.

But I did not let this deter me. I clicked on the Exit button, which took me back to the CRA front page, completed the process again, and this time… I now got a different error, “Our services are not available at this time”.

I shared this last error message in the LinkedIn ad for the recruiting drive and haven’t heard anything from them since. The ad appeared on Tuesday (IIRC) and the web site SNAFU is still there.

So, dear Canada Revenue Agency, if you see no submissions for your recruiting drive don’t conclude it’s because nobody wants to answer people’s questions about taxes. It’s because your web site just. doesn’t. work.

Maybe you guys should be concentrating to hiring people to make sure that your web sites are usable instead of obsessing about killing public sector jobs, because having fewer and fewer staff isn’t going to fix things on your end.

The post Canada Revenue Agency — please do better. Your web site is broken. first appeared on The Clever Shark.