Five Checks Before You Pay: How to Spot a Bad Job Offer Abroad

Start with the direction the money moves. In a legitimate placement, the employer or the recruiting agency is paid by the business that needs the worker, not by the worker who needs the job. A job seeker who is asked to pay a fee before a placement is being asked to reverse that flow, and that reversal is the single clearest signal of a bad offer.

The fee can be disguised as many things: a "registration fee," a "visa processing fee," a "training deposit," a charge for a medical exam booked through the recruiter, or a deposit that is refundable "after your first pay cheque." Whatever it is called, the test is the same: would a real employer, who wants the work done, ask the worker doing it to pay for the privilege of starting? If the answer is no, the fee is the offer's real purpose.

This is not a matter of taste or negotiating position. It is a settled principle of international labour standards that private employment agencies should not charge job seekers fees for finding them work — the cost of recruitment sits with the employer, because the employer is the one who benefits from the hire. Treat any request for upfront payment tied to getting or keeping a job offer as a stop signal, whatever justification comes with it.

A real staffing or recruitment agency is a registered legal entity, and that registration is public. Before replying to an offer, look the company up by its exact registered name — not just the brand name in the email signature — in the business register of the country it claims to operate from. Every EU member state runs one; in Slovenia the register is run by AJPES, and an equivalent exists for every other EU country under a different name.

A company that cannot be found under its stated name, that was registered only weeks before it contacted you, or whose registered address is a residential flat or a shared virtual-office suite, is not automatically disqualified — new and small companies are real too — but it removes one layer of reassurance, and means the other checks below matter even more.

Where the role is staffing or recruitment specifically, some countries additionally require the agency to hold a labour-market licence on top of ordinary business registration — a separate authorisation that lets it place workers, not just trade. Ask the sender directly for their registration number and, where relevant, their staffing-agency licence number, and verify both independently rather than taking a screenshot of a certificate at face value.

If the job involves being sent to work temporarily in another EU or EEA country while staying employed by a company based somewhere else, that arrangement is called posting, and it is governed by EU law — specifically the Posted Workers Directive. A worker who is genuinely being posted is entitled to specific paperwork before departure, and a legitimate employer will produce it without being pushed.

The core document is the A1 certificate, which states which country's social security system covers the worker during the posting — it is not a visa and not a work permit, and its absence, or a vague answer about when it will "be sorted," is a real gap, not paperwork that catches up later. Ask, specifically, for the A1 certificate, the written employment contract that names the actual employer, and the terms that will apply on site — pay, hours, and who is responsible for accommodation.

A recruiter who cannot name the destination country's employment terms, who won't put the employer's name in writing before you travel, or who says the contract will be signed "on arrival," is asking you to accept the posting on trust after the point where you still have leverage to refuse it. Get the paperwork before you travel, not after.

Legitimate hiring has a pace to it. Even a genuinely urgent vacancy allows a few days for a candidate to read a contract, ask questions, and decide. An offer that insists you decide within hours, that discourages you from asking a friend, a lawyer, or a labour inspectorate to look at the contract, or that frames ordinary questions as a sign you are not "serious," is applying pressure that has no legitimate hiring purpose.

Watch document requests as closely as you watch money requests. A real employer needs your identity document and, later, your bank details for payroll — it does not need your passport handed over physically and kept before you have a signed contract, it does not need your online banking password or a card PIN, and it has no legitimate reason to ask you to receive and forward money on its behalf before your employment even starts.

Payment requests routed through informal channels — a personal bank account rather than a company account, a money-transfer service, or cryptocurrency — are a second version of the same red flag as the upfront fee in the first check: money moving in a direction, and through a channel, that a real employer relationship does not require.

The last check is about your own paperwork, not the offer's. Before weighing any offer, know precisely what your right to work already is in the country the job is actually located in — a right that comes from citizenship or an existing residence-and-work permit, not from a recruiter's promise to "sort it out." A recruiter's optimism about getting you a work visa is not the same thing as you holding one.

If you are unsure what your existing documents actually entitle you to do, that is a question for the destination country's own labour authority or its work-and-residence permit office — not for the recruiter who benefits from you accepting quickly.

If an offer depends on a country granting you a status you do not yet have, treat the timeline for acquiring that status, and who is responsible for it, as part of the offer itself, not a detail to sort out after you have already committed.

These five checks are a way to judge any job offer, including one you don't want to accept — using them does not commit you to anything, and an offer that fails one of them can still be worth a follow-up question rather than an automatic rejection.

Evroproces places workers who already have the right to work in the EU, EEA, or Switzerland, or who hold a valid Slovenian or Croatian residence-and-work permit; this applies regardless of nationality. Evroproces is a Slovenian workforce solutions agency that places skilled and general-labour workers with companies across the EU and EEA, operating under the EU Posted Workers compliance model, with an A1 certificate arranged before each posting — exactly the paperwork described in the third check above.

If you want to check whether a specific offer, or an opening with Evroproces itself, is genuine, contact Evroproces directly at info@evroproces.si or +386 70 630 880 (the German-speaking line is +386 70 645 257), rather than relying only on the contact details in the email you were sent.