Job Hunting in Secret Is Not So Secret
November 3, 2016
While the American economy has recovered from the recession, finding a job is still difficult. Finding a new job can be even harder has you try to be discreet while handling emails, phone calls, and Web traffic under the radar. A bit of advice is to not search for jobs while at your current position, but that is easier said than done in many respects. Social media is a useful job seeking tool and LinkedIn now offers a job search incognito mode. SlashGear discusses the new mode in the article, “LinkedIn’s Open Candidates Feature Helps You Find A Job In Secret.”
The Open Candidates feature allows LinkedIn users to search for a new job while hiding their job search activity from their current employer. It will try to hide your job search activity, while at the same time it will add a new search feature for recruiters that displays profiles of people who have listed themselves under the Open Candidates feature. The hope is that it will bring more opportunity to these people.
However, nothing is ever secret on the Internet and LinkedIn can only do its best to help you:
While the new feature will probably be welcome by people who would prefer to carry out a job search while ruffling as few feathers as possible, LinkedIn does warn that even it will try to prevent your current employer from seeing that you’ve listed yourself as an Open Candidate, it can’t guarantee that it will be able to identify all of the recruiters associated with your company. In other words, use at your own risk.
If you work in a company that tracks your online social life or for a tech organization, you will have difficulty using this feature. LinkedIn and Microsoft employees will definitely need to use the first piece of advice, search for a new job on your personal computer/device using your own Internet.
Whitney Grace, November 3, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Russian High Tech Propaganda
June 1, 2015
The Soviet Union was known for its propaganda, and Russia under Vladimir Putin seems to have brought the art into the digital age. The Guardian gives us the inside scoop in, “Salutin’ Putin: Inside a Russian Troll House.” Journalists spoke to two writers who were formerly among the hundreds working at the nondescript headquarters of Russia’s “troll army” in St Petersburg. There, writers are tasked with lauding Putin and lambasting the evils of the West in posts and comment sections on a wide variety of websites. Though the organization cannot be directly tied to the Kremlin, it’s reported the entity does not pay any taxes and does not register its employees. It does, however, seem to have grown heartily in the two years since Russia went (back) into the Ukraine.
It is said that working conditions at the “troll house” involve 12-hour shifts, a dreary environment, strict rules, and low pay, though that sounds no different from conditions in many jobs around the world. Workers describe writing a certain number of “ordinary posts” about things like music, travel, or dating advice; writers are responsible for coming up with those topics themselves. Interspersed with such bland content, however, they write pieces asserting political perspectives assigned to them each morning. Editors check carefully to make sure the stories are on point.
I’d recommend reading through the whole article, but this is the section that struck me most:
“‘I would go home at the end of the day and see all the same news items on the television news. It was obvious that the decisions were coming from somewhere,’ said Marat. Many people have accused Russian television of ramping up propaganda over the past 18 months in its coverage of Ukraine, so much so that the EU even put Dmitry Kiselev, an opinionated television host and director of a major news agency, on its sanctions list.
“After two months of working in the troll agency, Marat began to feel he was losing his sanity, and decided he had to leave. From the snatched conversations over coffee, he noted that the office was split roughly 50/50 between people who genuinely believed in what they were doing, and those who thought it was stupid but wanted the money. Occasionally, he would notice people changing on the job.
“‘Of course, if every day you are feeding on hate, it eats away at your soul. You start really believing in it. You have to be strong to stay clean when you spend your whole day submerged in dirt,’ he said.”
Sounds like some people I know who always have a certain U.S. news channel blasting away in the background. Writer Shaun Walker is unsure whether the site they found in St Petersburg is the only location for this activity, or whether there are other hubs throughout Russia. The effectiveness of such propaganda on Russian citizens, however, seems clear to Russian journalist Andrei Soshnikov (quoted in the article), especially with the older, less tech-savvy set. As disheartening as these revelations are, they should not be surprising.
Cynthia Murrell, June 1, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
JobSamurai Offers Alternative Job Search Method (Without the Search)
May 29, 2015
The article titled Take the Search Out of Job Hunting with JobSamurai on MakeUseOf describes the perks in using JobSamurai next time you are out of work. A lot of people rely on services like Craigslist, but anyone who has searched for a job there knows that a good portion of the listings are frauds, or just non-existent. The number of irrelevant posts are also high and weeding through them all is time-consuming and frustrating. JobSamurai claims to have the answers, with a job website that minimizes the search factor. The article explains,
“JobSamurai uses your information to find jobs around the web that match your profile, then shows them to you as banner adverts on the websites you visit most often. They do this by leaving a tracking cookie in your web browser that sends data back to JobSamurai to notify them of where to display their content. It typically takes 10-15 days for their internal search engines to find all the jobs that match a candidate.”
While this means that users will need to exercise some patience before seeing results, it is balanced out by the absence of those terrible spam emails that job search websites love to litter your inbox with. JobSamurai promises to limit itself to one email every two months- which really seems like no emails at all.
Chelsea Kerwin, May 29, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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