I've been getting a ton of interview requests from "expert insight" companies asking to pay me anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars for an hour long interview, as I have "expertise" that make me a good fit for it.
While this sounds like something I would love to do, it feels a bit fishy, especially when they start saying things like I could get paid $5000 for an hour of work.
Are these types of arrangements legitimate? If they can go both ways, how do you tell a legit one from a scam?
I checked the company profile and turns out they were in the maximum total payout tier, a green flag. The only people back then who could contract at those quantities and rates were Microsoft or something so I decided to say okay. Sadly you can't just check most company history like this outside of oDesk.
After they gave me the NDA, it was indeed a tech giant the size of Microsoft and they were looking for someone who spoke the language I did for the kind of project I did in college, hence the specificness. However, it was an external recruiting contractor (apparently they don't get their hands dirty in Asia). These contractors were often shady because of their mass recruitment approach and bad English. They were also constrained trying not to leak the project and yet approaching strangers like this.
I'm not saying that your $5000/hour offer isn't a scam, but I'd say try to triangulate who it might be and why they might offer that much.
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