Dear HN,<p>Without naming names (although come April will do so in response to specific poster) I want to share a piece of advice after having been careless myself and realizing the error afterwards.<p>When we are in job search mode, specially in this atrocious job market, we are vulnerable to social engineering, and some bad actors appear to be taking advantage of these (expected) vulnerabilities.<p>One such vulnerability is limited time resources. To do due diligence on every single company before applying is a luxury that we simply don't have. This is specially important when applying to little known startups. If you are like me, come first of the month, you are going down that page and applying to whatever seems a good fit, one after another.<p>The other (expected) vulnerability is when in response to the application requests are made that one would normally subject to critical consideration.<p>This month I received a response from a company that after having expressed great enthusiasm regarding my application, requested a video introduction. It should have been a red flag for me that when I provided this from a well known service provider they requested a link that did not require their logging in to that service. After providing a link that did not require a record of their access to the video, they have ghosted me and have not responded to follow ups. This felt strange and (doh) I finally started digging deeper into the names of the team members on their about page and the picture that emerged was unlike the little snippets on their about page. (Turns out their ceo is actually not a tech visionary but rather a glorified marketer.)<p>Now it is entirely possible that this is simply yet another example of the degraded social norms in our society. But it is also possible that this company is collecting resumes and video (biometrics) specially since their "privacy" page indicates the typical assertion of copyrights over communications with them.<p>What I will be doing going forward (and I recommend the same and expect YCombinator to also recommend this in the top post for the who is hiring thread) is to, before providing such content, first obtain an acknowledgement regarding non-transfer of copyrights and strictly limited scope of sharing of such content before providing it. We live after all in the age of trivially created AI dopelgangers.
> first obtain an acknowledgement regarding non-transfer of copyrights and strictly limited scope of sharing of such content before providing it. We live after all in the age of trivially created AI dopelgangers<p>If you're assuming the other side is going to do something nefarious with the recording, why wouldn't they also lie to you about this?
> If you are like me, come first of the month, you are going down that page and applying to whatever seems a good fit<p>Nope. I'm going down that page (in my case, <a href="https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/" rel="nofollow">https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/</a>) and click off the "US only". Then I'm looking at 1-2 postings left. Then I close the page.