As if Hiring Wasn’t Hard Enough!

There isn’t a week that goes by where I don’t receive at least one call from a firm owner bemoaning the degree of difficulty and frustration he/she has endured to hire good young people and to get them to remain.

Yes, I get it. Believe me I do.

But then again as I’ve warned them, oh, about 2,000 times, you can’t pin a serious succession plan on the chance that some young high performer will show up at your door ready to lead the practice into the future. And it still amazes me how that advice is treated as seriously as asking my daughter to clean up her room.

But I digress.

I bring up the often painful subject of hiring because I came across an article the other day about a hiring scam that has wended its way into the accounting profession. 

Folks at UHY advisors are warning of online scammers who pose as accounting firm recruiters, and offer wide-eyed job seekers the career opportunity of a lifetime. That is if they provide a minor bit of information – such as their banking and personal data – and according to the article, in some instances, an upfront cash payment to reimburse the firm for onboarding “materials.”

Apparently some recent accounting graduates had been contacted online by someone pretending to be a recruiter from UHY – complete with a “phished” UHY logo in the email. The contact number as was discovered later, turned out to be a Google voicemail account.

When one unfortunate applicant who actually fell for the fraud reported for the first day of work, not only was there no job, but they had been duped out of $3,000 for “job preparation materials.”

Now online scams are hardly a new phenomenon. As I reported in this space several times over the past two years, I had been contacted on more than one occasion by my bank which claimed a security breach. All I had to do was re-enter all my account information and all would be well. The only problem was the logo used was black and white, whereas the actual bank uses bright red and blue. It also raised an eyebrow or two when I noticed “account” was spelled “acount.”

With the research tools available today, it’s almost unthinkable that young folks – who grew up with 21^st century technology can be fooled. Basic procedures like going to the firm’s website and seeing if the contact actually works there would be a good place to start. Then there’s always LinkedIn to see if said HR person has a profile. If they don’t, that should raise about 100 red flags.

Job hunting and recruiting is a hard business to be sure. But with a little preventive homework it doesn’t have to turn into an expensive nightmare.