Blind ads on Craigs List : should you send in your resume?

25 October 2013 – In the past two weeks we have been swamped by Posse List members who have asked “should I submit my resume to a Craigs List ad when the employer is unknown?”

We have been emailing members individually so we thought at this point we’d send our thoughts to the list.

Obviously The Posse List is not the only entity posting contract jobs. We have 227 staffing agencies, law firms, corporations, government entities and NGOs posting jobs with us. And many times they also post the same job on Craigs List, Indeed.com, LinkedIn, Yahoo Jobs, etc., etc.

And there are a lot of agencies who have their own extensive listservs and do not need us, and/or post on the job boards mentioned above.

We are kind of between a rock and a hard place.  If we say“don’t submit your resume!” to a blind ad then we’ll be accused of tooting our own horn, selling our service as best.  But the hell with it.  We’ll just point out a few things and you decide:

1. As most of you noted, if the job is really legitimate then the agency/entity  should name themselves and in fact many do.

2. But you also need to understand the dynamics of the industry. It is brutally competitive.  Agencies will use blind ads so to hide from other agencies what projects they have.  And in many cases it is a small agency/vendor that does not want The Big Dogs to know they are out there. On occasion we will post a blind ad for an agency but it is an agency we know and do a complete vetting.

Example:  a number of you took the time to do some research on a few blind Craigs List ads, tracking/tracing across Indeed.com and LinkedIn and other job boards and discovered the agency. You called the agency, found them to be “legit” and submitted your resume.

3.  But this also raises a big issue: phishing – the act of attempting to acquire information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details (and sometimes, indirectly, money) by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in order to ultimately acquire someone’s “identity”. We are all reading the daily stories about surveillance, tracking and the loss of anonymity. As we have learned, the “triple identifier” of birthday, gender and postcode is all that someone needs to uniquely identify at least 87 per cent of US citizens in publicly available databases. And there you are supplying “party unknown” with your resume that contains your name, address, phone number, email address plus a heap of other information.

4.  But we do it everyday in other venues. We accede to this surveillance and allow phishing.  Not everyone cares enough about their own privacy. Many of us use social media or Internet-based services carelessly, allowing others to make use of information in unintended ways.  We publicize on Twitter or Facebook that we are on holiday or “checked in” on Foursquare somewhere with the whole family showing we are not at home, and keying in exactly where home is and who we are.

5. Worse case?  Ok, we are not suggesting the Chinese government is masquerading as contract attorney staffing agencies … but other unscrupulous agents might be.  One thing we learned at the Georgetown Law cybersecurity/internet surveillance forum:

The Chinese are the masters of Remote Access Tools (RATs) that attackers use to gain control of compromised machines. Scenario: the Chinese navy is known to be interested in expanding its capabilities from green-water activities-near to shore-and building up a blue-water, or deep-sea, presence. To do that, it needs to advance its satellite communications, boat building, robotics, and other technologies. So the naval officer says to his intelligence forces “here’s the five-year plan”.  He does not use the military’s elite hacking crews, because he doesn’t want this traced back to the military. But there are plenty of crews for hire that are only loosely affiliated with the government, so he uses one of those. He says, ‘Get me everything you can on these technologies.’ That starts with open-source intelligence collection.  They find out who the key people are at the U.S. tech companies they’re interested in, and do a Google search. They get people, facilities, potentially who the company’s software vendors are, and what kind of security software they run. They track them on Facebook, on LinkedIn, etc. They get the jargon they can use to start crafting an cyber attack. But first they create a “profile”. And if they can get access to you they will find out who your partners are and get access to them. It is all about exploiting a trust relationship. They can run all the names through social media – Facebook Twitter, LinkedIn – and map your personal relationships. They will get the information they need. And if they can do it … 

Ok, as we said, I think the Chinese have better things to do then cyber attack the contract attorney market.  But there certainly are scores of others that can.  But we’ve raised an eyebrow or two over here when Posse List members … none of them apparently connected … all asked about a blind ad post to whom none received an acknowledgement. Yes, some agencies can be rude, some can be uncaring and not respond to your resume submission. But nobody … and several being perfect for the gig … gets a response?

6.  Bottom line: the competition will get more brutal.  In the document review arena, predictive coding is quickly taking hold. In D.C., Arnold & Porter is closing its huge document review center in Tenley Town.  They don’t need the space because they don’t need all those reviewers as they move full-blown into predictive coding. Several other firms will be doing the same in 2014.

And as one HR person told us at a Big Law firm in NYC “look, our system was we’d hire 100 reviewers to get it down to 65-70 because we knew we were going to get some dead weight. That’s just how agencies operate. We knew we’d need to cull. Now, we just need a good, focused team.”

Which is what we have been writing about for the last two years. Law firms, staffing agencies and e-discovery vendors … and even corporate in-house legal departments … are utilizing small “data swat-teams” comprised of contract attorneys who possess the tech skills + the analysis ability to conduct complex searches, analyze information and generate reports. But fewer bodies are required. It is a reason we have expanded our job postings way beyond temp work, and why we go to every major corporate counsel event: to secure more job sources.

NOTE: we’ll have a special series about predictive coding … how to learn it, how to get jobs, etc. … in November.

So blind ads will continue as agencies keep more of their cards to their chests.

Advise? Same as we have said before. Nervous about blind ads? Then keep your agencies informed when you are available for work, stay close to the agency recruiters you know … or start building relationships with them … and just stick with the “open” ads/posts. There are dozens on Indeed.com, Law.com, LinkedIn, Monster.com, etc., etc. There is a lot of work out there. And a lot of sources to find it.