The African Centre for Economic Transformation (ACET) estimates that about 400,000 graduates enter the labour market every year seeking various forms of employment.

As a result, many job seekers have fallen into the hands of syndicates that collect various sums of money from them under the guise of getting them recruited.

Mr Delali Kwasi Dake, the CEO of JobWeb Group Ltd, a job portal website which has the objective of linking job seekers to employers, has blamed the proliferation of recruitment agencies and companies, most of which are not regulated, for the rising incidence of job scams.

According to Mr Dake, who is a also a lecturer at the University of Education, Winneba, some of these companies request prospective job seekers to pay various sums of money before they attend job interviews, which in his view contributes to the employment scams.

“Some of them ask job seekers to pay money and these poor job seekers never hear from such companies after the so-called interview. This is a clear duping scheme adopted by some of these companies,” he stated.

“In a recent case, someone took GH¢1,000 from a lady with the promise of getting her employed in one of the telecommunication companies. It turned out that it was a scam,” he pointed out.  

Mr Dake, CEO of the only Ghanaian owned job website in four African regions — Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, cautioned job seekers to be wary of recruitment scams when surfing the internet for job opportunities.

He admitted that scammers sometimes posted job vacancies on websites without the owners’ permission, but indicated that most credible websites issued warnings to prospective job seekers never to pay any money in the course of their recruitment process.

He further noted that while it was reasonable for recruitment agencies to charge some fee to cover their administrative cost, it was prudent that such money was paid after a candidate had successfully been issued with an employment letter.

Mr Dake, therefore, wants the government, the Trades Union and the Ghana Private Employers Association to tighten all loopholes to ensure that the already stressed job seeker is protected.

Recruitment company

In the interview with The Mirror, the Performance and Strategy Coordinator at The Capital Group Ltd, a human resource services provider, Mr Leslie Adetola, noted that job seekers were the very people who should be blamed.

According to him, before someone pays money to any recruitment firm, the person should do a background check to know the reputation of such company before any payment is made.

“If a recruitment company has no visible office, there is a high probability that such a firm may be fake. Sometimes, such fake agencies invite prospective job seekers to attend interviews in hotels and other obscure places,” he pointed out.

While admitting that recruitment companies needed to be regulated, Mr Adetola noted that the “onus is on the job seekers to be careful.”

Victims

A victim of  such a scam (name withheld) told the The Mirror that he applied for a job and received a mail that he should pay GH¢50 before his document would be processed for an interview.

He said after paying the said amount, he never heard from the person and all efforts to track the person had not yielded any result.

Another victim told The Mirror that someone asked her to pay GH¢1,500 to get her employment with one of the telecommunication companies, which turned out to be false.

She has since failed to track the person as all their conversations and transactions were done via phone, which is now  inactive.