Beyond Accuracy: Centroid-Guided Contrastive Loss for Structured Fraudulent Job Posting Detection

Syed Ali Ahmed, Malaika Raza, Muhammad Shoaib Siddiqui, Muhammad Rafi

Fraudulent job posting detection aims to identify job advertisements that are corrupted either through fake content, misleading information, or negative intent, disrupting the online eco-system of job-seekers and employers. Existing studies in this domain lack effective methods to simultaneously achieve high accuracy and meaningful structure of latent-space representations that capture subtleties among fake posts. To this end, we propose Centroid-Guided Contrastive Loss (CGCL), a loss function which unifies classification with densely formulated clustering to consistently reshape latent-space through a centroid-driven top-$k$ push-and-pull mechanism. The complementary nature of CGCL enables the model to enforce accurate decision boundaries and maintain high clustering compactness, effectively capturing both class separability and latent structure. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance of our method on EMSCAD, a public benchmark dataset. The code associated with this work is available at: https://github.com/ali-ahmed925/CGCL_code