When looking to make a career move, no one should ever have to fear being scammed. Students searching Carleton University’s MySuccess job board are no exception. The school should take greater initiative to prevent tricksters from using a vital employment resource as a vehicle for their own dark and deceptive agendas.
MySuccess allows students to apply for “on-campus, volunteer, part-time, full-time, summer, and internship opportunities” through Carleton Central. This provides myriad job opportunities that appeal to a variety of needs and interests, so the school should ensure only appropriate and legitimate postings are present.
It’s preposterous that any given student could suffer a financial loss when accessing a university job board—one assumed to be safe and regularly monitored for suspicious content. Students come to this resource presumably looking to gain experience and make money rather than to lose the latter or, even worse, their personal identity or security.
“Job boards are an easily accessible and helpful way to search for jobs and research the current job market,” Career Services writes. But students also need to have faith in these resources for job boards to achieve their full potential.
Current “preventative” measures in place on MySuccess include a warning about “fraudulent job postings and tactics” listed on the main Career Services page, along with a list of red flags to look out for when considering job postings that are provided by the university.
These measures do not prevent or discourage scammers. Students who’ve not previously seen the list of red flags or dealt with scammers before may not actually know how to identify a phishing scheme. It should be up to Carleton as the host of MySuccess to make sure scammers can’t access the portal to begin with.
A better filtering system for scammers must be implemented to shield students trying to browse job opportunities through Carleton Central. A much more active alert and prevention protocol is needed to keep students, their possessions and their identity safe. The University of Calgary has assured students by using spam blocking technology that blocks up to 99 per cent of unwanted messages, something Carleton should look into.
At the very least, an advisory email should be sent out in response to every identified job scam that is posted or distributed. This would demonstrate accountability on behalf of Carleton and ensure students aren’t being lured into potentially dangerous schemes.
