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That prompted the Live Green, Live Smart Institute, a nonprofit focused on promoting sustainability and green building science practices, to establish its "Green Job Clearing House" -- a list of 30 job sites vetted and selected by the group -- and provide tips on how to avoid online job scams. (Disclosure: Jobs.GreenBiz.com was among those selected for the clearinghouse list, a happy coincidence we didn't discover until browsing through it.)
GreenBiz talked to Live Green, Live Smart Institute Executive Director Peter Lytle about his group's project and to Nick Ellis, a managing partner for the environmentally focused executive search firm Bright Green Talent, for his advice on how to avoid red flags of all sorts when looking for a job or posting one in the green arena.
The Live Green, Live Smart job sites list and jobseeker tips, which became available this week, are the results of a six-month project that Lytle's team undertook because they were frequently asked about where to find reliable job postings.
The group set out to explore a range of websites and submitted their resumes to sites to test the experience. From the start, the team was aware there were people trolling the online world of jobseekers trying to capture ID and financial information for no good purpose, Lytle said.
"We knew there were issues," Lytle said. "But we were not aware of how problematic it truly was."
His team encountered dubious sites that called for jobseekers to submit private personal and financial information -- such as ID, Social Security and credit card numbers -- with their resumes in order to gain access to job postings or obtain services such as sharing the resume with employers, serving as a recruiter or processing the jobseeker.
The team also found that big gaps in information sometimes exist in job postings questionable and otherwise. For example, some postings for so-called green jobs were so vague it was hard to tell what the job involved and what, if any, aspects were related to environmental responsibility.
Irresponsible Reporting
This article re-reports a "study" that while done with the best possible intentions, is frankly very irresponsible. The study in question has absolutely no transparency. The criteria or the names of the sites that were examined are not available for independent review. In fact, the results were reported backwards. The sites to avoid should have been listed, not some arbitrary list of "good" sites.
There are plenty of small mom and pop job sites out there trying to pay wages, rent, and make a living that are very respectable. This study merely washes over this fact, and could be potentially harmful when job-seekers note that they are not in the "list". The handful of suspect web sites (which to be honest are run-of-the-mill phishing sites when it comes down to it) should be listed and reported to the proper authorities. At the end of the day, the consumer, the job-seekers in this case, need to make an self-informed choice as to whether their personal information will be misused. Certainly a site that asks for such personally identifying information as your SSN is an obvious scam. The red flag seems obvious when a little common sense is applied.
Of course, there may be legal ramifications applied to the calling out of such phishing sites, but if that is a concern, perhaps the study should have been avoided altogether. As the technical director of such a green job site, and one that was missing from the list, you can see why I might be more than a little miffed. GreenBiz may be happy that their site as included, but the job list here is merely provided as a service by a third-party vendor. This hardly qualifies GreenBiz as a true "job site"; merely a site with some jobs thrown in.
My last point concerns the inclusion of such weird entries such as the all-encompassing Wisconsin "jobing" site. There is no hint on their homepage that they cater to the green market at all. This seems like such an odd inclusion, I wonder how penetrating the study really was. How many sites were included in the research? What criteria led to the inclusion of Careerbuilder and Monster, two massive corporations that need no promotion, and certainly don't need to be highlighted as being "for real". The inclusion of the EPA careers page is also odd. Just who is it, do you think, that needs to be told that their site isn't a scam?