Blind Ads Explained

What are blind ads? When you are job hunting, you will see many job openings or job offers listed by recruiting firms or employment agencies.  Generally these job offers are sufficiently vague so that you cannot determine who the actual employer may be.  Do you ever wonder why that crutial information is not revealed? Are these jobs just as valid as offers made by the end employer?  The answer is complicated.  However, I can tell you a few things to consider before sending your resume or an application in response to a blind job ad.

First, unless you know the agency placing the ad, you should exercise extreme caution.  Blind ads can and often have been used to gather personal information about individuals as part of an identity theft scheme.  If you answer such an ad, be sure to include as little personal information as possible.  NEVER send your social security number or any banking or credit card information.

Second, if you are currently employed and answer a blind job ad, you need to understand that the recipient of your resume could possibly even be your current employer.  Once when our company was looking for a new accounting manager, we received a resume from one of the accounting managers from another division of the company.  Their "secret" job hunt was no longer a secret!

Third, there are many legitimate reasons why a company might not want competitors, customers or other employees in the company to know they are looking for someone to fill some sensitive position.  The company may also simply want to work with an agency who may be much more qualified to find highly technical or specialized personnel than they are.  Using recruiters is often a very cost effective and efficient way to find the most qualified personnel.  The agency will not want to make that information public, since revealing their client's name would mean that their competitors would have the information they need to try to take that business from them.  So it stands to reason that they would only share the information with prescreened, qualified job candidates.

Fourth, some jobs listed as blind ads do not represent actual job openings at all.  Recruiters use the ads as a way to gather a large number of resumes for a particular set of skills so that they will have more potential candidates to use later when an appropriate job offer is found.  This is not a bad thing necessarily.  If your need to find work is urgent, however, you may find that the resume gathering job offers may take a much longer time to materialize.

You should evaluate the type of job offer, the quality and reputation of the recruiter placing the ad and the demands of your current employment situation before you decide to respond to a blind ad.  For some job types, blind ads may be your only option.  For others you may be much better off looking for offers that come directly from the actual employer.  This is the reason that the vast majority of jobs you will find on www.JobOpenings.net are job offers found on the website of the end employer, the actual company who would write your paycheck.

The Internet is a fantastic resource for job hunters - one that becomes more useful the more you know about it!