My university has recently issued us lecturers with some guidance to pass on to third year undergraduates and postgraduates on the dangers of applying for jobs online. I thought the words of advice they offer on how to protect yourself from identity theft would be very useful to my blog readers too.
The first thing is to be careful that the job advert you’re replying to is not bogus. That’s the great thing about using jobs.ac: they are such an integral part of the academic community that you know their job adverts are vetted really carefully. But on some other sites it has been known that bogus ‘employers’ place false adverts with the intention of harvesting contact details of people who have been fooled into making an application.
Another concern is that if you are posting your CV online anywhere, don’t include your date or place of birth nor your private phone numbers. You can give all these details to interested employers later. Remember that CVs can provide enough information for unscrupulous people to commit identity fraud. This is really important if you are using public computers, for example in a library or internet cafe, to post your details online.
I am not telling you all this to put you off applying for jobs online, far from it. I think online recruitment is obviously the way of the future for all sectors, but especially for the higher education sector. We have to get used to filling in standardized forms and emailing them to universities or actually applying online and institutions work extremely hard to make sure their systems are secure. However, it’s important that you the jobseeker be as safety conscious as possible too, to ensure that the only outcome of your online application is your getting a new job!
