Beware - How do recruiters fool the freshers...

Hello friends.....

I hope your celebrations would not have ended still. The joy of being CA is such that it invites endless celebrations.

Today lets discuss how the recruiters lure the Freshers. All those who have qualified recently are the most vulnerable and soft targets for all the recruiters. Lets discuss what are the ways how a people deceive the newly qualified CAs.

Fake Offer Letters

One fine morning I received a mail from Bajaj Auto Ltd. offering me a good position in the company with a good pay. As most of the people who are into the employment, I was frustrated with my current job and so I was looking for a change.

After being rejected from almost 7-8 employers, this mail was the only ray of hope for me. I was excited and informed all of my friends about this but after a close scrutiny of the offer letter I found that it was a fake offer letter. I was going to be a victim of a fraud if I had accepted the offer.

Recently from the past two years there has been a sudden outburst of such kind of offers. There are few fraudsters who send such kind of spam mails to selected recipients and deceive them.

Lets learn how to identify such fake offer letters. Below is the letter which I received from Bajaj Auto.

At the first instance this offer letter seems to be an original one. Since it is printed on the letterhead of the company, no one can raise a doubt on the authenticity of this letter. Further it is signed by the Asst. Manager HR and so this seems to be a letter sent by the company itself.

As its said appearances can be deceiving, the same thing has happened over here. Though the offer letter seems to be an original one, it is a fake letter send by someone.

How to identify the authenticity of such letters and how to identify that they are sent by fraudsters:

• Normally such offer letters are send by the HR department. They send such letters through their official e-mail addresses and never from their personal mail ids. So the first trick is to check the domain name of the mail address. If its a public domain like "gmail.com" or "yahoo.com" then there are chances that such mail can be a fraud.

         However nowadays the fraudsters are getting more and more expert and organised.
         Hence the generate a fake mailing address with a fake domain just like that a of a
         corporate domain and send such mails so that we can never question this offer letter. 
         Below is the screeshot of the mail I received where the domain name used was 
         "bajajautoltd.in" so that it portrays as a mail sent by the company itself.

• Further one thing which I found unusual in this mail was that there was nothing written in the body of the mail. The letter was just attached and send it to me. This was something weird which I noticed in the mail.

• If you see the letter carefully, there are watermarks used in the whole letter on both the pages. Watermarks are never used in any of the official documents. Even the font colour pattern is unique. There are three type of colours black, red, blue, brown and green used in the letter. Any sort of corporate communication doesnt use such colourful letters.

• There's a paragraph mentioning the reimbursement of some travel costs which will be incurred by the candidates. In reality none of the companies mention such nonsense stuffs in their offer letters.

• The most important thing which I noticed in the mail was that the company wanted to deposit Rs. 12,650/- in the Company HR account. BEWARE....none of the recruiters actually require the candidates to pay any money to them. If you notice carefully it is specifically mentioned that the payment should be only in cash and no other modes like cheque or demand draft. Cash deposits do not take much time to reflect in the other person's account and it can give enough time for the fraudster to run away with the money. So these people prefer cash deposits over other modes of deposit.

• You can also move a step further to call on the number provided in the mail. I am pretty sure that you wont be able to make a call to this number. Everytime you try, this number would be busy or out of order.

So friends please be aware if u receive such kind of offer letters. DO NOT deposit any money inspite of how much lucrative the offer is. In case if you have already done, then request the bank to stop the payment.

Salary Structures

One area where all the freshers are easily fooled is the salary structure offered by the companies. The salary packages mentioned in the job offer are based on a concept of CTC (i.e. Cost to the Company).

Salaries in India are quoted in terms of CTC or cost to company. CTC is nothing but the cost that the company incurs to employ you and keep you employed. It includes your pay and anything else that the company may incur to keep you in employment. It’s important because a lot of components of your CTC may not translate into actual take-home cash every month.

As a broad thumb rule, what you get in hand will be 70% of your CTC. So if your annual CTC is Rs 5 lakh, you can expect to get an annual take home of 3.5 lakh or Rs 29000 per month.

The CTC is not going to be the take home salary. i.e. your in hand salary that you get. The difference between the take home salary and the CTC is stuffed with various non cash components like: car, driver reimbursements, interest free loans, free meal coupons, contribution to provident fund, medical expenses, Leave Travel Allowance, telephone reimbursements etc.

Just remember one thing. The more the non cash components in the salary structure, the less your take home salary will be. In layman's language that means you will receive less salary in your bank account.

One more thing towards which I would like to draw all of your's attention is the Provident Fund part in the salary. As per the PF Act, its optional for any person having a basic salary above Rs 6500 to opt for the PF deduction. But employers do not disclose this thing beforehand.

But once of you opt for PF deduction, you do not have the permission to change your decision for the lifetime. PF deduction is a forced savings that you might incur, so its a safe & wise decision if you opt for PF deduction. But those who want more salary in hand, they can opt not to go for the PF deduction in the initial stages. For the all those who do not opt for the PF scheme in the beginning have the option of being a part of the scheme in the future but vice versa is not possible. So be careful and take a wise decision.

I hope this will be useful to you in determining your correct salary structure and the keep you away from the fraudsters.

In case of any questions feel free to post a comment over here or mail me on snehal.sukhadia@gmail.com

Bbbye....