Job Scams Taught Your Applicants Not to Answer

Job scams are one of the fastest-growing kinds of fraud in the US. The FTC says reports of job scams nearly tripled between 2020 and 2023, and reported losses in the first half of 2024 alone passed $220 million [1]. Most of those scams start the way a lot of real recruiting starts: a text or a call from a stranger who says they have a job for you.

Recruiting teams don't think about that second part enough. Every fake "Hi, this is Emily from the hiring team" message teaches a few more people to ignore the next one, and the next one might be yours. When an agency tells me candidates have got flaky, that they apply and then vanish, I ask to see the first message they send. Quite often it reads exactly like a scam.

Your first message, read from the other side

Picture the applicant. On Sunday night they applied to six or seven jobs from their phone, mostly through job boards that had reposted the listing, so they aren't sure which company is behind which ad. On Tuesday a text arrives from a number they don't know: "Hi! We reviewed your profile and think you'd be a great fit. Are you available for a quick chat? Reply YES." There's no company name, or one they don't remember, and a link to a scheduling page on a domain they've never seen.

Scam texts have every one of those features too, right down to the reply-YES. The candidate gives it a couple of seconds, and ignoring it is the cheapest mistake available, so that's what they do. In your ATS it shows up as no response, and after two more nudges somebody closes the record as unresponsive.

Calls have the same problem plus one more filter. Carriers and phone apps now label plenty of unknown numbers as spam before anyone picks up, and a number that makes hundreds of outbound calls a day, which is what a busy recruiting desk looks like to a carrier, is a likely candidate for the label. Texting has its own gate. Since February 2025 the major US carriers have blocked business texts sent from 10-digit numbers that were never registered under 10DLC [2]. A lot of recruiters still text from tools nobody registered, and they have no idea how many of those messages never arrived.

"Unresponsive" doesn't tell you why

This matters because of what teams do next. If 40% of applicants never answer first contact, the usual conclusion is that the pool is weak, and the fix for a weak pool is more applicants: more ad spend, more boards, more reposting. That tends to make things worse. More reposting puts more copies of your listing out there under other names, which is the environment scammers work in, and we've written about how ghost jobs have made candidates suspicious of every posting.

At least three different groups end up with the same no-response status. Some people never got the message. Some got it and decided it was fake. Some got it and lost interest. Only that last group says anything about candidate quality, and most ATS reports can't tell you which is which.

You can get a rough idea in an afternoon, though. Take last week's non-responders, have someone call twenty of them from the main company line, say who they are and which job the person applied for, and ask whether they saw the earlier message. When teams have tried this with us, a fair number of people said yes, they saw it. They just didn't believe it was real.

Sound like the job they actually applied for

Most of the fix is cheap and a bit boring. Open every first message with the company, the exact role and when they applied: "You applied for the forklift operator role at our Joliet site on Sunday." A scammer can't write that sentence, because they don't know it. Cut the generic praise. Keep links on your own domain. Register your texting numbers, and check now and then how your outbound numbers show up on candidates' phones. It also helps to put a line on your careers page saying how you'll get in touch and what you will never ask for on a first contact, like bank details, a payment for equipment, or a photo of their ID over text.

Speed does more than all of that put together. A call ten minutes after someone hits submit makes sense to them. The same call three days later, after they've applied to four other places, comes from a stranger. A lot of what we call drop-off before the first call is just this: the gap between applying and hearing back is long enough for the candidate to forget who you are.

How Asendia AI handles this

Asendia is a voice-first AI recruiter, and the timing problem is the main thing it fixes. It phones each applicant soon after they apply, at any hour, so the call lands while they still remember applying. You decide how the call opens, and it should be specific: the company, the role, the site, and when they applied. From there it runs the same structured screen with every candidate and asks again when an answer is vague.

Nothing in the call asks the candidate to click a link or hand over money. It's a conversation about a job they picked. The answers and a short summary go into the ATS you already use, so a recruiter can see who was reached, who wasn't, and what they said, rather than a column of no-responses. Most of the agencies using Asendia came to us for volume, to get through hundreds of applicants a week without hiring more recruiters. I'd argue the bigger change for many of them is how many of their applicants they actually reach.

Final Word

Scammers have spent the last few years copying the look of real recruiting, and candidates have responded the only way they can, by trusting less. You can't fix that for the whole market. You can make sure your own first contact arrives quickly and is obviously about the job they applied for.

This week, have your team send you the first text and voicemail a new applicant gets. Read them as someone who applied to seven jobs on Sunday night. If you couldn't tell them apart from a scam, your candidates can't either.

Ready to transform your hiring strategy? Schedule a Demo with our founders today!: https://asendia.ai/talk-to-founders