Kevin It’s been a hot minute since I last posted on general principle, let alone for this series, but here we are, halfway through the year already. It’s time for another installment of the Janky Job Jamboree, a series dedicated to scam jobs on job boards. I find the choicest of scammy, sus, or otherwise nonsensical job postings, and roast em here for your amusement, and for educational purposes.
Before I get any further, I should warn you as a reader that this post contains mentions of prejudice and racism, specifically against those among the global majority, living in economically disadvantaged areas where resources and legitimate thriving job opportunities are limited. If this is something you need to take into consideration, I encourage you to give this post a miss, and go check out some of my other stuff instead. We’ll kick it together some other time. Deal?
Today’s janky job comes to us from LinkedIn. Ah, good ol fashioned LinkedIn. I’ll give them credit, they do take shady job postings seriously, which I love to see in job boards.
So, we’re looking at a “remote sales representative” job posting that went live as of a month ago, as of the date this screenshot was taken last weekend. I’ve noticed that LinkedIn is making transparency in job postings mandatory, by stating that over 100 ppl clicked the Apply button, during the month this posting had been live.
However, it doesn’t mean that those 100 job seekers actually went through w/ the application, and hopefully none of them went through w/ the application. My hope is that whoever did go through w/ the application saw the man behind that curtain, and noped outta Dodge.
It’s pretty telling that the responses are managed outside of the safe confines of LinkedIn. While there are many legit companies who do this in their job postings, scammers, including MLMs in disguise and MLM-adjacent “companies” do this in order to make sure there’s no paper trail on the site job seekers find them on.
This company’s stated location is in a state other than Maine, but it’s in the eastern time zone. The job’s location is listed for Kitui County, Kenya. Seriously? KENYA? Hmmm. Something aint right here. Is this company even licensed to do business internationally?
Based on what I’ve dug up about this company, it appears that they aren’t. I’ve explored similar names and variations in the state business entity database, and found nothing even remotely applicable.
Kitui County is a location where there are many ppl looking for work, w/ the poverty level being at 63% according to Wikipedia, and many of the schools there operate w/ limited resources including available water for handwashing. This job posting isn’t giving ppl job opportunities. It’s preying on vulnerable job seekers in an already economically disadvantaged location, and exploiting them to pad some stupid schmuck’s downline so they can make money off of them, while these job seekers make nothing and end up further in the financial dumps.
That does it. I already fuckin hate where this is going, and we haven’t even gotten into the job description yet. No fair!
Just typing this out in the description box was torture. I’d say it reads like a 5th grader wrote it for a school project about Shark Tank and did the research at the business college library they live across the street from, but that’d be an insult to 5th graders. I’ve seen 5th graders who are far better writers in one finger than the pyramid scheme puke who wrote this sham of a job post could ever hope to be, and some of these 5th graders were below grade level academically.
This so-called “company” wants a competitive Remote Sales Representative. Competitive, how? Is this like The Hunger Games, or American Ninja Warrior? Who’d be there to compete against? Furthermore, who would be there to contact as a potential victim, I mean customer, in locations where legitimate jobs, opportunities, and resources are limited anyway? This “company” is counting on the locals not to know any better, so it’s easier for them to dupe them into buying useless insurance, and funneling them into their stupid MLM faction.
Explaining the difference between insurance plans is part of the sales process, so whoever decided “differentiate” was a great word to use here has no idea what it is, or how to use the word.
That being said, this matches up w/ the grammar and sentence structure used on the company’s rudimentary site set up on a host that isn’t Wix, and it’s every bit as incoherent and full of misused business buzzwords they clearly don’t understand.
Moving on to the part about “customers portfolios.” Since when do customers have portfolios in this industry? In what instance is this even a thing anyway? Whoever wrote this job post no doubt ganked this word from some rando’s company social media content, and ran w/ it to try and sound smart to vulnerable, desperate job seekers looking for their next big break.
“Build strong positive relationships, attain growth” Translation: you’ll pretend to be someone’s bestie, pretend to care about them and their struggles, while waiting for the right time to deliver the pitch-slap to try and sell them completely useless insurance products, or frame this so-called “opportunity” as their ticket out of poverty when it’s nothing but a merry-go-round of unpaid exploitation.
At the same time, they want someone to “increase our firm’s reputation.” Reputation as what? A sleazy, scammy, and predatory MLM branch out of many others, cuz you got that covered by a long shot. Even though I hate to make accusations of racism, I can’t ignore the fact that the one in charge of this MLM group is either white or white-passing, and they chose Kitui County as the location for this job posting, where the locals are a part of the global majority racialized as Black.
This was no accident. No way, no how, no siree Bob. There’s ignorant and dense, but this goes so far beyond ignorant and dense that it isn’t even in the same area code anymore. I’ve stumbled on other U.S. based MLMs posting on job boards from other countries to scout for potential downlines, specifically countries where resources are limited.
I did my part to make sure those got shut down but good. But this? This is brazen AF, and this is never ok. Ever. Anyone who thinks this is ok is seriously evil and stupid, and so messed up in the head to say the least.
“Greeting customers warmly.” How do we do this in a remote job? I can’t help but wonder if whoever posted this worked retail back in the olden days when they made their money honestly, before they decided that scamming was an all-around better idea than some stinky old honest job. I bet they found the employee training manual from that job knocking around the house one day, and decided it was great fodder for their job descriptions.
What’s this crap about “sales/discounts?” Those are highly unlikely to be a thing where this MLM is concerned, but I bet this is a trap to make sure whoever gets caught up in this mess has to fund whatever lead lists and training there is, so the MLM leader gets to live in their super expensive house in the suburbs.
“Communicating precisely with customers about goods/services.” Dude. Seriously. Who fuckin talks like this? Probably someone trying to be some hardcore corporate type, and failing across the board.
When they say “able to handle customer inquiries and update information” they mean pull the wool over unsuspecting customers’ eyes, and confuse the ever-loving shyt outta them in order to get them closer to sale closure, and then keeping tabs on them thereafter to sell them more useless crap they need like a hole in the head.
“Efficient” w/ “Windows Operating Systems and a reliable computer.” How does this MLM branch leader expect someone living in an area where the poverty rate is so high to have a reliable computer? I know there’s been initiatives in recent years to make the internet more accessible to the residents of Kitui County, and this stupid MLM is taking major advantage.
Super shameful. On that note, whoever wrote this really needs to have that thesaurus taken away from them, cuz they used that word, “efficient.” It doesn’t mean what they think it does.
Can I just go over to their house and take that thesaurus away from them as an intervention, and have it mounted on my wall as a souvenir? Lol, jk. I wouldn’t go near their house w/ a 10 foot bargepole, even if they paid me a million bucks.
Now, we’ve come to the most honest part of this post, strategically located at the bottom to sneak this past the site admins, and get more unsuspecting job seekers to click their postings. It’s a 1099 commission-only hamster wheel from hell, where it’s an arena of pay-to-play on a playing field always skewed in the leaders’ favor. Those so-called “residuals” and “bonuses” are the dangling carrots attached to moving goalposts designed to set unsuspecting job seekers up for failure from the get-go.
Those unsuspecting job seekers won’t see a dime from this horseshit, and it wastes their time in the process, not to mention money in those fees and costs the posting conveniently omits. That’s money job seekers don’t have in the first place, and money that could’ve gone towards more important things like living expenses instead. That’s time they could’ve spent getting themselves closer to a legit opportunity that pays them actual wages, and needlessly dragging out their job search in the process.
This “company” is part of the problem, along w/ the rest of the heads of the Hydra pyramid scheme that keep sprouting up. This is a sign that that we as a society have failed, when “companies” like this actively target the most vulnerable groups of job seekers.
This isn’t even getting into the racial and colonialism aspects of this MLM faction leader in their cushy home in Bumsville, Maine, thousands of miles away from Kenya. I guarantee their home is complete w/ the spoils from years of ill-gotten gains in the form of fancy, luxurious trappings of success, which is an insult to the communities they’re trying to exploit.
But not today, Satan! You won’t be preying on these job seekers on my watch. I hereby consider you reported to the admins. You may now pound sand and kick rocks.
This was no job opportunity, and job seekers from economically disadvantaged areas deserve so much better than these predatory buttholes. On that note, job seekers on general principle deserve so much better than this, too. Job seekers are fuckin exhausted at the end of the day from the thousands of applications they take time out of their lives to put together, and don’t always have the energy to report postings from MLMs pretending to be legit opportunities.
It was all I could do to report scam jobs when I was looking for work, even though it meant maybe 3 hours of sleep at night sometimes. It was worth it to me, though.
I’m happy to report that LinkedIn took action, and pulled this listing. Over to you, readers. Have you come across similar listings? Did you apply for them? If so, what became of it? I’d love to hear your thoughts and takeaways, so drop it all like it’s hot, and let’s talk.
Missed the previous installments? No worries! I gotcha covered: 3, 2
