Someone tried to recruit me for a job that does not exist

Twice this month, someone tried to recruit me for a job that does not exist. 🤦‍♀️

I did not fall for it but only because I was paying proper attention that morning. On a different morning, at the end of a harder week, I am less sure.

Here's what happened

The first email arrived at 1:32 AM CET. A recruiter at a large US insurer, writing about a confidential search. My background, she wrote, had stood out during their shortlist review. I had never applied to anything.

The second came 11 days later at 2:21 AM, from a recruiter at a medical device search firm in Florida briefing an interim People role for the Dutch market.

Both emails closed with the same sentence. Word for word.

Now think back to recruiter outreach five years ago. Your inbox full of messages explaining that your profile was a great match for a Marketing Manager position. Irrelevant and badly targeted. And, in hindsight, reassuring: a possibly tired human trying to hit a quota.

Relevance used to be the biggest green flag. When a message was a genuine fit, you knew that the person reaching out had actually spent time assessing your profile.

That is over. Both of these emails described my career accurately and made the #role sound plausible, if you didn't pay too close attention to the details, such as the missing rate, duration, start date, scope.

So, plausible enough to get an answer, empty enough to never be wrong about anything.

Why this is happening

The only scarce thing in this operation is a reply. Generating and mass-sending the messages costs nothing. What the sender needs is confirmation that a real, senior, employable person is reading and willing to engage.

To what end? Anything from advance-fee charges for background checks, credential harvesting, ID document collection for identity fraud to malware in an attached "role brief".

Why this sucks for both job seekers and recruiters

I coach senior leaders who left roles they held for years and are now looking at a market that completely reorganized itself. They know they are good at what they do and that opportunity arrives through someone who already knows their reputation. An email saying exactly that does not read as a scam.

Recruiters are having their own difficult year. New AI features in systems they are still learning. Applications they cannot tell were written by a candidate or a model. And now their own names turning up in emails they never sent.

How to deal with this

I looked both recruiters up. Both were real people, real profiles, real jobs. I messaged both, gave them the fake address, and asked them to confirm whether it had come from them.

👉 I do not think the answer is to treat every message as a threat but definitely try to reach the person. If you are looking, take the two minutes to ask them directly. If you are recruiting and a candidate tells you your name is being used, reply to them.

Good luck and stay safe out there 💪