Andrew Wiens got an unexpected phone call one day asking him if he wanted a job. Jocelyn McIntyre was offered a position within hours of sending a recruiter her resumé. Finding a job was never so effortless.

"It was dead easy," says Pauline Tinka.

At a time when decent-paying professional jobs are few and far between for young Canadians just out of school, all three of these UBC grads—Wiens, McIntyre and Tinka—decided their solution was to go overseas as English teachers. Like thousands of other Canadians looking for an adventure or a speedy way to pay off student loans, they discovered those jobs are easy to find. As the recruitment posters plastered all across campus attest, all that's needed is an undergraduate degree, English as a native language and a North American accent.

There's a tired old adage, however, that says if it seems too good to be true it probably is. Korea alone issued almost 1900 Canadians with visas to teach English last year, but not all of those teachers will return happy: the Internet is full of horror stories of crummy accommodation, cruel directors and gruelling hours. With thousands of job applications just a point and a click away, job-seekers invariably find that the secret is learning to separate the schools that are excellent from those that are failing—before going overseas.

McIntyre, 22, learned this first-hand in January, just weeks after finishing her degree requirements at UBC. After being offered a job in Seoul, she asked to be put in touch with a teacher working at the school. She e-mailed the contact name she was given, and the teacher wrote back to say she didn't want to talk because she was afraid she'd get in trouble with her boss or be fired if she spoke candidly.

"I was all ready to fax back my contract to her and everything, sign my life away," says McIntyre. But, uncomfortable with the situation when the teacher wouldn't talk to her, McIntyre told her recruiter she'd prefer to work at a different school. Her recruiter argued with her, calling her untrusting. Then the recruiter called the school's director and the two of them fed McIntyre a story, saying the teacher who'd refused to talk was just jealous of prospective new teachers. McIntyre didn't buy it.

"You've really got to do the research on your own as a job-seeker. You can't believe anybody," says Jim Russell, founder of Russell Recruiting, a Vancouver-based firm that sends teachers to schools in Korea and China. Russell and one other business partner also run an Internet job-posting board, www.ESLjobfind.com, which, launched last May, now receives roughly 25,000 hits a day from people looking for English as a Second Language (ESL) work across the globe. "You can't believe the recruiter," he says. "You can't believe me. You can't believe anybody except the actual teacher that's [already] in that job at that particular time."