- May 1, 2006
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- Alex
If you have seen a job listing on LinkedIn that says DealerRefresh is hiring, it is not real. We did not post it. There are about 90 of them.
I just got back from vacation and spent this morning digging into this properly. Here is what I found:
LinkedIn crawled our Jobs Available and People for Hire forum between August 5 and August 9. Our server logs show 230 requests from LinkedInBot. On August 7 and 8, LinkedIn published roughly 90 job listings from those forum threads and listed DealerRefresh as the employer on every one of them.
We have never posted a job on LinkedIn. Not once. Our LinkedIn Jobs tab still says "You haven't posted any jobs yet." Posting 90 jobs would cost real money. Nobody paid it, because nobody here posted anything.
We are not the only ones this happened to
The job IDs sitting next to ours in LinkedIn's system show the same thing happening to companies with no connection to us. A consulting firm in Toronto is listed as hiring for a position called "PUBLICATION" in France, and the job description is the footer of their own website. Another company is listed as hiring "Experienced Professionals" in Papua, Indonesia.
Whatever LinkedIn ran on August 7 and 8 did this to a lot of people.
Nothing was hacked and nothing leaked
Every word in those listings came off a public page on this forum. No private information got out. Nobody got into anything. Old public posts got scraped and mislabeled.
One thing worth knowing
Deleting your old forum thread will not remove the LinkedIn listing. Several of you have asked. LinkedIn already has its own copy of the text. Taking down the original does nothing to theirs.
LinkedIn is not making this easy
This is the part wearing on me.
We cannot delete these. They do not appear in our own Jobs manager, because LinkedIn created them instead of us. There is no button for it and no bulk removal. Nothing on our page touches them. The only tool we have is reporting them one listing at a time, ninety times, for listings we never made.
Jeff opened a support ticket on August 11. Eight days, no response.
LinkedIn built this, published it under our name, left us no way to take it down, and has not answered us about it
What we are doing
I have the full list of all 90 with job IDs and URLs, our server logs showing their crawler hitting us, and the examples from the other companies. That goes to LinkedIn today, along with a request to pull every one of them and stop attaching crawled listings to our page. We are also asking them to leave this forum out of their job system for good, because it is a discussion board and not a careers site.
What would help
Report it from the listing itself. Use the three-dot menu, then Report this job, then "This job is fake or not from this company." A report from the company being misrepresented carries more weight than another one from us.
And if a candidate has called you about a job you posted here years ago, I am sorry you are dealing with it. That one is on LinkedIn. You did nothing wrong by posting here.
I just got back from vacation and spent this morning digging into this properly. Here is what I found:
LinkedIn crawled our Jobs Available and People for Hire forum between August 5 and August 9. Our server logs show 230 requests from LinkedInBot. On August 7 and 8, LinkedIn published roughly 90 job listings from those forum threads and listed DealerRefresh as the employer on every one of them.
We have never posted a job on LinkedIn. Not once. Our LinkedIn Jobs tab still says "You haven't posted any jobs yet." Posting 90 jobs would cost real money. Nobody paid it, because nobody here posted anything.
We are not the only ones this happened to
The job IDs sitting next to ours in LinkedIn's system show the same thing happening to companies with no connection to us. A consulting firm in Toronto is listed as hiring for a position called "PUBLICATION" in France, and the job description is the footer of their own website. Another company is listed as hiring "Experienced Professionals" in Papua, Indonesia.
Whatever LinkedIn ran on August 7 and 8 did this to a lot of people.
Nothing was hacked and nothing leaked
Every word in those listings came off a public page on this forum. No private information got out. Nobody got into anything. Old public posts got scraped and mislabeled.
One thing worth knowing
Deleting your old forum thread will not remove the LinkedIn listing. Several of you have asked. LinkedIn already has its own copy of the text. Taking down the original does nothing to theirs.
LinkedIn is not making this easy
This is the part wearing on me.
We cannot delete these. They do not appear in our own Jobs manager, because LinkedIn created them instead of us. There is no button for it and no bulk removal. Nothing on our page touches them. The only tool we have is reporting them one listing at a time, ninety times, for listings we never made.
Jeff opened a support ticket on August 11. Eight days, no response.
LinkedIn built this, published it under our name, left us no way to take it down, and has not answered us about it
What we are doing
I have the full list of all 90 with job IDs and URLs, our server logs showing their crawler hitting us, and the examples from the other companies. That goes to LinkedIn today, along with a request to pull every one of them and stop attaching crawled listings to our page. We are also asking them to leave this forum out of their job system for good, because it is a discussion board and not a careers site.
What would helpReport it from the listing itself. Use the three-dot menu, then Report this job, then "This job is fake or not from this company." A report from the company being misrepresented carries more weight than another one from us.
And if a candidate has called you about a job you posted here years ago, I am sorry you are dealing with it. That one is on LinkedIn. You did nothing wrong by posting here.
