There have been two news items recently in India Today and in the Hindu that exposes the ugly underbelly of IT campus recruitment in India.
The starting point is students who do not know what they want to do in their career. Their parents usually pay for a seat in an Engineering college that showcases "100% placements". When the time comes to graduate they find out that the claims were too good to be true. So in come the middleman or corrupt Recruiters who ask them to pay fees (essentially bribes) for a job in a big name company. More often than not these "job offers" are fake and candidates find out about them later. The other case could be a small unknown company that promises to hire people, takes money and after a few months shuts down shop and vanishes with their money.
So how can a fresh graduate guard against such fraudsters? Here are a few of my thoughts:
The starting point is students who do not know what they want to do in their career. Their parents usually pay for a seat in an Engineering college that showcases "100% placements". When the time comes to graduate they find out that the claims were too good to be true. So in come the middleman or corrupt Recruiters who ask them to pay fees (essentially bribes) for a job in a big name company. More often than not these "job offers" are fake and candidates find out about them later. The other case could be a small unknown company that promises to hire people, takes money and after a few months shuts down shop and vanishes with their money.
So how can a fresh graduate guard against such fraudsters? Here are a few of my thoughts:
- Never agree to pay any person or company any amount of money for the promise of finding you a job.
- When any middle man approaches you claiming to "represent" one or more companies - do a due diligence. Google him, and find out about his antecedents. It's possible that the person changed his name. Try to do a reverse image search too.
- While some IT companies have signing bonds - in no case do they take the money upfront as far as I know.
- If it's a new company promising a large number of jobs - remember the old adage "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is" - Search for the company name on search engines, and also for the executives of the company.
