Looking for a high-paying job? Be careful!

As soon as Ali read the entire message there was no doubt left in his mind that he was in the process of being conned.

Having had no luck in the job market for months, Ahmad Ali, a recent graduate from the Institute of Business Administration (IBA), finally got an interview call for a position he was actually interested in.

On July 2, Ali received a call from an individual who claimed to be working for Shell Global, informing him that he had been shortlisted for the position of associate human resources manager. The caller also notified him that his interview had been scheduled a week later at the company’s office in Bahria Complex III.

Ecstatic that he may have the opportunity to work for one of the largest oil marketing multinationals, Ali did not realise that the call was made from a cell phone number and not a landline. Neither did he pay attention to the fact that the company’s office is actually located in Clifton.

An hour before the interview, Ali got a call instructing him that when he arrived at the venue, he should not look for the Shell office but rather ask the guards to direct him to suite number 106.

The actual room turned out to be a temporarily rented out office without any company signage or permanent employees. Brushing aside any reservations that came to his mind, Ali gave his best for the interview that lasted only a few minutes. It ended with the two interviewers telling him that some files would be emailed to him shortly and that he would have to make a presentation based on them the next day.

After waiting for hours, he eventually got an email after from a Yahoo email account with two ‘PSO’ financial statements attached. Completely confused about why Shell would send PSO financials from a Yahoo email address for an HR presentation, Ali decided to call back the recruiter.

When the recruiter came on the line, she casually responded to all queries by saying that Ali should relax and prepare for the presentation on the basis of the files sent to him. She claimed that the financial information of the two companies was very similar and in any case, the presentation was just a confidence-measuring exercise.

The nonchalant attitude of the prospective employers worried Ali and this is when he realised that he had been communicating through a cell phone number all this while. At no point during the entire process had there been any communication through official channels.

He immediately went to the Shell website to verify whether there were any job openings being displayed on the careers page. Much to his shock, he was greeted with the following message:

“There have been recent incidents that have occurred with organisations falsely pretending to recruit on behalf of Shell or by people claiming to work for, or be affiliated to, Shell.”

The notification went on to read that such communication mostly originated from unofficial email addresses and that at some point in time the recruiters would ask for money for processing documents.

Red flags began to pop up in Ali’s mind at once. As soon as he read the entire message, there was no doubt left in his mind that he was in the process of being conned. He recalled that during the interview, the phoney recruiters kept urging him to attend a workshop the next day where he would be briefed on all the formalities that had to be completed before he could be hired. This is probably where they would have asked him to deposit some money.

When contacted for comments, Shell Pakistan was completely unaware that such a racket was currently operating in Karachi. General Manager Human Resources Leon Menezes, however, did reveal that such scams were not new to Pakistan.

He shared that a few years back Shell Pakistan had received complaints of fake recruitment letters being sent from Nigeria. Menezes explained that many people in Pakistan had received letters on counterfeit Shell letterheads informing them they had been selected for an overseas job and they should deposit a sum of money in a certain bank account for processing of the necessary paperwork, such as visas and work permits.

It was after this scandal that Shell put up the notice on its website. “The responsibility of due diligence falls on the candidate,” added Shell’s GM for External Relations, Abid Ibrahim.

Although the two general managers promised they would investigate the issue further, they were frank that the possibility of any concrete results emerging was slim. They highlighted that there was no government mechanism to address such problems nor did the state offer support to bring such culprits to justice.

In a country where unemployment is already widespread at a whopping rate of more than 15 per cent, such recruitment scandals pose another problem for those in the job market.

With the lack of government vigilance, it is not surprising that such scams have come to surface in a city like Karachi where issues like unemployment have fuelled violence on a massive scale in the past.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 9^th, 2010.