Cana­dian Flag on Par­lia­ment Hill

Wel­come to the “How To… Find A Job In Canada” series!

Say­ing that last year wasn’t great eco­nom­i­cally speak­ing is an under­state­ment. Pretty much all coun­tries world­wide suf­fered from the global eco­nomic down­turn and Canada was no excep­tion. Yet, a lot of peo­ple are still con­sid­er­ing mov­ing to Canada, while oth­ers are already in the process and are prob­a­bly wor­ried about whether they will get a job at all.

There is no easy answer when it comes to employ­ment. You know the story… a bit of patience, a bit of skills, a bit of luck.

I’m not a job coun­selor, and I’m not an expert. But I do know how it works in Canada and I’m hop­ing to pass along some infor­ma­tion that may not be obvi­ous to every­one. A post will be pub­lished every Sat­ur­day… enjoy!

New­com­ers to Canada are usu­ally very eager to find a job. Add that to the fact that they may not be famil­iar with the local job mar­ket and that when money is start­ing to run out peo­ple would do any­thing, it make them very vul­ner­a­ble to var­i­ous job scam. Learn how to rec­og­nize them!

The “work at home” scams

This is everybody’s dream: work at home and get rich quick! No expe­ri­ence required, plenty of money to be made. Really? Nope.

You will often find these ads in local news­pa­pers or in free news­pa­pers, such as Metro. While there are legit­i­mate work at home job offers, you should always be very sus­pi­cious at first. Remember:

• Check out the com­pany on the inter­net. If the com­pany is legit, you should be able to find some good tes­ti­monies, or at least some solid info on the job. Don’t be fooled by fake tes­ti­monies: some scam­mers flood forums with very pos­i­tive posts about their expe­ri­ence. They are not hard to rec­og­nize: they usu­ally only reg­is­ter on forums to spam about their company!
• Don’t pay for any­thing. You shouldn’t need to buy equip­ments in order to do your job.
• Hang on to your per­sonal infor­ma­tion: don’t pro­vide bank account num­ber, SIN num­ber etc. until you are sure the com­pany is legit, and that the com­pany really need this information.

Not all work at home job offers are scams but a lot of them are not prof­itable any­way. For exam­ple, a lot of data entry jobs are a sale pitch for an infor­ma­tion kit that you must buy to get you started. Same for pro­cess­ing claims job: you will often be asked to first buy the soft­ware and pay for your training.You can read more work at home scams on the Scam.com forum.

The “pyra­mi­dal schemes”

Try putting your resume on Mon­ster, like I did recently, and you will soon start receiv­ing a lot of emails about “sales oppor­tu­ni­ties”. Some are legit­i­mate MLM com­pa­nies, while most of them pro­mote a pyra­mi­dal scheme, which is ille­gal in many coun­tries, includ­ing the U.S.A and Canada.

Pyra­mi­dal scheme is a non-sustainable busi­ness model. Basi­cally, it involves sub­scrib­ing to a plan/ buy­ing a prod­uct and get­ting a com­mis­sion every time you recruit a new per­son, who is also going to buy the prod­uct and recruit other peo­ple. Pyra­mi­dal schemes are a scam because only the peo­ple who started the scheme, who are at the top of the pyra­mid, will actu­ally make money. Peo­ple at the bot­tom of the pyra­mid will not get any money.

The dif­fer­ence between multi-level mar­ket­ing and pyra­mi­dal scheme is that in the lat­est, you do not receive or sell any prod­uct or ser­vice. Yet, com­pa­nies which use multi-level mar­ket­ing scheme are often crit­i­cized and even some­times con­demned for being more on the pyra­mi­dal level scheme side.

If you are ever approached by such a com­pany, make sure you do the maths and check out their rep­u­ta­tions online.This is a good forum dis­cussing all the scams in this cat­e­gory. Don’t for­get that a lot of these com­pa­nies are very pushy and will do any­thing to defend their rep­u­ta­tion: don’t be fooled by fake tes­ti­monies!

“Help wanted: expe­ri­ence not required” scams

These scams are pretty rare since most of the “help wanted” ads are usu­ally legit, but it is worth mentioning.

Some unscrupu­lous employ­ers will scam new­com­ers this way. For exam­ple, if you do not have expe­ri­ence, they employ­ers will ask you do work for free dur­ing your train­ing, which can last for days… or weeks. And of course, at the end of your non-paid train­ing, the employ­ers will say you do not fit the positions.

Or some employ­ers make you pay for your train­ing. Even­tu­ally, you will either be fired at the end of your train­ing, or be told that you are not good enough and have to pay for more training.

Remem­ber these few rules:

• If it’s too good to be true, it prob­a­bly is. A lot of scam­mers are suc­cess­ful because peo­ple are greedy and want to make money fast. Unfor­tu­nately, it doesn’t work like that.
• Legit­i­mate employ­ers would never ask you to pay for your train­ing or equip­ment to get you started.
• Be care­ful of “blind ads” where you can not find any con­tact infor­ma­tion. If you are doing some­thing legal, usu­ally, you have no prob­lem with peo­ple know­ing who you are… right?
• Don’t pro­vide too much per­sonal infor­ma­tion: you should keep your SIN num­ber safe, as well as your bank account num­ber, credit rat­ing etc. Espe­cially if you are not hired yet!
• In doubt, google. Or con­tact the Bet­ter Busi­ness Bureau for back­ground info.

Related posts:

1. How to Avoid… Employ­ment Scams
2. How to Avoid.. Con­sumer Scams
3. How to Avoid… Email Scams
4. How to Avoid… Bank­ing Scams
5. How to Avoid… Phone Scams