I have received a couple of strangely similar recruitment emails in a week, so I am documenting them here in case someone else Googles the wording.
The first arrived with the subject:
“Opportunity Alignment Your Thoughts?”
The sender introduced themselves as a “Senior Talent Acquisition Scout with Colliers”, saying they were supporting “confidential searches for high-impact opportunities” and that my web development background had stood out.
After asking for more information, I was told:
“Colliers has active hiring needs in technology and software development.”
What made the email convincing was that it used the name and job title of a real recruiter with a genuine LinkedIn presence.
But there was one important detail: the email was sent from:
job.colliers.com@gmail.com
That is not a Colliers email address. It is a Gmail address designed to look a little like one at first glance.
The conversation quickly moved towards requesting my CV, preferred contract arrangement, availability and location.
The responses also started to feel increasingly automated and repetitive.
Then, a few days later, I received another recruitment email.
This time it was a $$$K frontend role
The second email described a “confidential senior engineering mandate” and eventually provided a lengthy brief for a:
“Senior / Principal Frontend Engineering Lead | Confidential Technology Search”
The anticipated compensation was huge, including performance incentives and equity.
Despite the detailed description, the company itself remained confidential.
After expressing interest in learning more, the next step was:
“send me your latest resume/CV, and I will submit your profile directly to the hiring team for consideration.”
So my CV could apparently be submitted directly to a hiring team before I was told which company that hiring team worked for.
No thanks.
Are these fake recruiter emails or CV harvesting?
I do not know.
They could be automated recruiter outreach, candidate database building, impersonation, CV harvesting or something else entirely. I cannot verify the intention behind either email, so I am not going to claim that either sender or opportunity is fraudulent.
What I do know is that these emails are becoming surprisingly convincing.
They use the names and job titles of real people.
Finding the person on LinkedIn does not mean the email actually came from them.
That still does not tell you who is actually behind the email.
There was another pattern I started noticing: replies consistently arrived around 20 minutes after I sent an email. Not instantly, not hours later, but roughly the same delay each time.
That does not prove the conversation was automated, but combined with the repetitive language and highly structured responses, it certainly made it feel that way.
My rule from now on is simple:
If you want to submit my CV to a hiring team, first tell me which company you are submitting it to.
And if you found this page by Googling “Opportunity Alignment Your Thoughts?”, “confidential senior engineering mandate”, “Senior / Principal Frontend Engineering Lead”, or “submit your profile directly to the hiring team for consideration”, then apparently I am not the only one wondering what these emails are about.
Be careful what you send and who you send it to.