The past two years saw the balance of power shift from employers to applicants as the labor market, flush with job openings, disrupted the dynamic. But just as avenues opened up for applicants, opportunists pounced, impersonating recruiters and hiring managers in an effort to steal applicants’ money.

Employment scams skyrocketed in the latter part of 2020, peaking with 21,832 reported in the third quarter of 2021, according to Federal Trade Commission data. The Better Business Bureau’s 2021 Scam Tracker Risk Report found employment scams were the third-riskiest category tracked by the watchdog group that year. The BBB estimated 14 million people in the US and Canada are targeted annually by employment scams, resulting in $2 billion in damages, according to a 2020 survey of 10,670 people who reported incidents.

Scammers deploy a range of tactics, from creating fake job boards with seemingly authentic company branding to issuing fraudulent checks meant to reimburse candidates for purchasing work equipment from phony suppliers. The goal, almost always, is to bilk unwitting job-seekers, Josh Yavor, CISO at cloud email-security platform Tessian, said.

They are “fraudulently impersonating employers, or parties affiliated with employers, in order to achieve their goals, [which are] usually some sort of financial reward, by being able to trick people into transferring money…or by compromising further accounts or being able to achieve identity theft,” said Yavor. This presents headaches for HR and IT teams intent on ferreting out bad actors.

HR should publicly share their hiring processes and policies so that applicants aren’t taken for a ride, Yavor explained. As phishing scams grow more sophisticated, this question will underscore the candidate-recruiter dynamic: “How do you build and establish trust when mutually, on both sides, [they’re] starting from a point of generally little to no preexisting relationship?” Keep reading here.—SB

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @SammBlum on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Sam for his number on Signal.

What if, during the workday, you had an unfiltered view into how employees spend their time? Remember that portrait of the great aunt whose eyes seemingly track your every move? She works in HR, and she’s watching. Whether employees work in-person or remotely, you’d have a window into their keyboard strokes, calendars, and even innocuous chatter on Slack.

A recent New York Times article illustrated the breadth of employee surveillance across a range of industries, from finance to healthcare. It’s a practice that occasionally sees certain tools give workers a “productivity score” and as HR Brew reported earlier this year, exploded in white-collar industries when the pandemic sparked a shift to remote work in 2020.

Often, employees are monitored without consent. As Cynthia Khoo, a senior associate at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, told HR Brew in January, “Worker surveillance technologies, as well as the algorithmic management technologies [that] they’re usually deployed in conjunction with, and employers’ use of them, are largely unregulated.”

Employees who spoke with the Times bristled at the thought of omnipresent monitoring, and said the practice cratered morale. “I found myself really struggling to explain to all my team members, master’s-level clinicians, why we were counting their keystrokes,” Jessica Hornig, a Rhode Island social worker at United Healthcare, who managed a team there, told the paper.

Hey, you. Yes, YOU. There in the back. Since the onset of the pandemic, many studies have suggested that remote work hasn’t negatively affected worker productivity. So, is it worth tracking employees to this extent, if it means torpedoing trust, or worse, potentially losing good workers who quit in protest? How can HR engage in-person and remote employees without damaging morale?

Join the discussion on HR Brew’s LinkedIn page, or reply to this email with your thoughts.—SB

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @SammBlum on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Sam for his number on Signal.

Last week, HR Brew asked readers if, in anticipation of an economic downturn, their organization has cut down on spending. A resounding 63% responded “yes,” while 37% said “no.”

Whether Beyonce’s Birkin or a satchel from Target, businesses appear to be opening their purses a little less frequently than they might’ve a year ago, and HR is feeling the pinch. Companies have been cutting costs in a variety of ways, including freezing hiring, reducing office space, and slowing business travel. Twitter even canceled its company-wide retreat to Disneyland (but perhaps they could consider Knott’s Berry Farm).

HR professionals, especially those specializing in recruitment, have felt the stress of tightening budgets firsthand as tech giants such as Apple and Twitter have let go of recruiters amid recent hiring slowdowns.

“When the world changes and capital gets tighter, everybody’s kind of looking and saying, ‘We may not need as big of a staff as we thought,’” Doug Clinton, managing partner at Loup Ventures, a tech investment firm, told the Washington Post in July. “We were kind of in the boom times, now we’re coming down the roller-coaster into the tougher times.”

Think of it as the lipstick index for employers.—KP

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: Post-Roe v. Wade, 76% of women under 40 are more likely to work for a company that supports abortion access, according to a recent poll. (Lean In)

Quote: “You shouldn’t have to have cancer to be able to work remotely. And certainly, if you have cancer, you should be able to work remotely. It’s really as simple as that.”—Alex, an NYC municipal employee whose request for reasonable accommodation to work from home was denied, despite a cancer diagnosis (Hell Gate)

Read: The scourge of employment ghosting continues, affecting candidates and recruiters in equal measure. (BBC Worklife)