How many clicks should it take just to read a job description? Today I almost gave away access to my LinkedIn, trying to just read a JD. A recruiter messaged me on LinkedIn and sent me a Talent Acquisition role, allegedly at Uber. To see the details, a quest began: View Document → View with LinkedIn → CAPTCHA → security check → LinkedIn Sign in → verification code. I was so struck by the number of steps that I started taking screenshots for a post about terrible candidate experience. But at the end of the whole process, the code never came. It didn't come to me – it went to scammers. And then I noticed the domain 😱 The post about bad candidate experience turned into a post about how easily recruitment friction can be confused with recruitment phishing. The most ironic part? I'm a recruiter. LinkedIn and hiring platforms are my daily environment. And I still ended up entering my credentials. And one more irony: the password I entered turned out to be wrong, I'd simply forgotten it, and entered an old one 🤣 At which slide would you have suspected phishing?
This is actually scary — not because phishing itself is something new, but because of how normal the whole process looks. And I think this is exactly the problem. We’ve become so used to complicated digital processes that sometimes bad UX and phishing can look almost identical 😅 The fact that even someone working in recruitment every day can get this far says a lot. Definitely a reminder for me as a CEO too: sometimes the most important security step is simply stopping for a second and asking, “Why am I being asked to do this?”
You can hear about spam and fraud a million times and still fall for it by accident. Glad to hear that you caught on at some point that something was off
My checklist from now on: 🔴 Check the domain in the address bar before any login 🔴 Legitimate document viewing doesn't require re-signing in via LinkedIn 🔴 If viewing a JD feels like a security quest – that's already a red flag in itself.