By George Blomgren, Milwaukeejobs.com

Identity theft is on the rise, and computers and the internet are often involved in this crime. Meanwhile, computers and the internet have also become the tools of choice for job seekers. As periodically reported in the media, job seekers can be vulnerable to scams and identity theft. After all, volunteering a certain amount of personal information is a necessary part of any job search. Fortunately, the following common sense guidelines can help protect you when using the internet for your job search.

1. Choose employment Web sites which actively work to filter out suspicious employers and opportunities. You can typically judge this by the quality of the employment opportunities listed. If you see a lot of “work from home” opportunities, MLM opportunities, “secret shopper” gigs or anything that sounds too good to be true, you may want to avoid the Web site in question. Note that it is our policy to list only legitimate employment opportunities on our sites.
2. Be on the lookout for foreign or international companies that want you to get involved in any sort of money transfer or merchandise shipping, especially if they imply that you will receive a percentage of large amounts of money.
3. On many (but not all) employment Web sites, employers have to pay for access to resumes posted by job seekers. This helps protect job seekers, since scammers avoid things they have to pay for. Beyond charging employers to use their site, you may want to find out what additional measures an employment Web site takes to deter shady operators. We take a number of steps to ensure that employers who purchase resume database access are legitimate businesses.

Read on!