What we do to keep fraudulent postings out
The main defence is structural rather than editorial: the index is built from sources that are hard to impersonate in the first place.
Employer-direct sourcing
Postings are crawled from employers' own applicant tracking system boards and their first-party careers pages. The posting comes from the company that is hiring, at an address that company controls.
A source block list
Reposting and aggregator sources are excluded rather than ranked down. A source that relists other people's roles, or republishes a posting under a new stamp with no new requisition behind it, is blocked so nothing from it is crawled.
Removal on request
A posting is removed on request, from the employer whose name is on it or from anyone who reports it and turns out to be right. There is no paid placement to unwind and no advertiser to consult.
No employer pays to be listed, so there is no commercial reason for a doubtful posting to stay up. Removing one costs us nothing except the posting.
None of this is a guarantee. A fraudulent posting can reach an employer's own board, and a compromised or impersonated careers page can look exactly like a legitimate one from the outside. That is the gap a report closes, which is why the reporting route below is part of the policy rather than a courtesy.
How to report a suspected fraudulent posting
Email hello@jobshifu.com. A report from any reader is accepted, whether or not you have an account.
Include these three things, because they are what makes a report actionable:
- The link to the posting. The JobShifu page for it, the employer's own posting URL, or both. A link is what lets us find the exact row and the source behind it.
- The employer name on the posting. Roles are frequently advertised under a trading name, a subsidiary or an agency, and naming what you saw tells us which one to check.
- What looked wrong. A payment or a fee requested, an interview run entirely over a chat app, a request for banking or identity documents before an offer, an employer who does not appear to have the role open, or anything else that prompted you to write in.
Screenshots and the message thread help, and nothing is required beyond the three items above. If you are reporting something you are unsure about, report it anyway. A report that turns out to be a false alarm costs one reply.
If you have a posting in hand and want to check it yourself first, the posting checker reports when a posting was first seen, whether it is still on the employer's board, and whether the same role has been relisted.
What happens after a report
- Acknowledgement, the same day. You get a reply confirming the report arrived, sent by a person, to the address you wrote from.
- Review. We check the posting against the source it came from, the employer's own board, and the rest of what that source has published. What we are establishing is whether the posting is what it claims to be and whether anything else from the same source is affected.
- Blocked at source when confirmed. A posting confirmed as fraudulent is blocked at its source, so it stops being crawled, stops being parsed, and stops being served. That removes it from the job feed, from search results, from saved jobs and from the public posting pages in one action, rather than from each surface separately.
- An answer either way. You are told the outcome, including when we could not confirm the report and are leaving the posting up. A silent no is not an outcome.
Blocking at source is deliberate and it is stronger than deleting a row. A deleted posting comes back on the next crawl of the same source. A blocked source stops producing it.
Reporting a posting to us is not a substitute for reporting fraud to the authorities where you live. If money has changed hands, or documents have, that report should be made as well.
Scope, and where this policy comes from
JobShifu displays publicly advertised job postings from many employers, which makes it a job posting platform rather than an employer advertising its own roles.
Ontario's Employment Standards Act has required operators of job posting platforms, since 1 January 2026, to keep a written policy on how they will address fraudulent publicly advertised job postings, to post that policy and a reporting mechanism somewhere users are likely to see them, and to retain superseded versions of the policy for three years. This page is that policy, the email address above is that reporting mechanism, and the link in the footer of every page on this site is where both are posted.
Two notes on how it is applied. The policy is not limited to Ontario postings or to Ontario readers: a single index with one standard is simpler to run and easier to check than a policy that changes by region. And prior versions of this page are retained for three years, so what the policy said on a given date can be established rather than remembered.
Questions about the policy itself go to the same address: hello@jobshifu.com.