A new survey found that almost 40% of companies posted a fake job listing this year — and 85% of those companies interviewed candidates for fake jobs
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Companies said they are posting fake jobs for a laundry list of reasons, including to deceive their own employees.
More than 60% of those surveyed said they posted fake jobs “to make employees believe their workload would be alleviated by new workers.”
Sixty-two percent of companies said another reason for the shady practice is to “have employees feel replaceable.”
Two-thirds of companies cited a desire to “appear the company is open to external talent” and 59% said it was an effort to “collect resumes and keep them on file for a later date.”
What’s even more concerning about the results: 85% of companies engaging in the practice said they interviewed candidates for the fake jobs.
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This should be illegal. It’s basically scamming people into giving their personal information, a very sensitive ones.
and their time and stress. job hunting is awful
Good luck proving it.
We had a case not too long ago where someone “recruiting” for one of the GAFAM who was stealing PII by “accepting” applicants, getting their IDs and personal info for supposed employment, and when these people showed up for work, the real company had never heard of them. I think they got 30 people last time.
Well that’s a whole other can of worms.
you could just, idk, fine job listings that are up too long without a hire.
Too long being like 1 yr
That means nothing. Sometimes it takes a while.
Still doesn’t change the fact that those companies are exploiting people
Interestingly, in my profession the media is saying that they’re screaming for people, my peak association is saying that we should issue Visa’s for international recruitment.
That same peak body is publishing articles saying that our profession is demanding too much pay.
Meanwhile with 40 years experience, I’ve spent the past 30 months looking for the next opportunity, getting ignored or worse, getting told that my application won’t be pursued without any explanation. Demoralising is not strong enough to convey the impact of such a response.
I speak with my peers with similar levels of experience and they’re seeing exactly the same thing.
I hung my shingle out 25 years ago as an independent consultant, been through several downturns across my career, but I’ve never seen anything like this.
I think that we’ve gotten to the point where the free market has broken and government intervention is required.
Did somebody say trust busting?
Please Eli5 trust busting
Here’s an old political cartoon trying to explain it, but if you would rather read.
Not quite the same topic, but certainly related, Hidden history of corporations in the U.S.
You know how corporations acquire other corporations and the government dramatically reviews it for a period of time and then allows it? Trust busting is like that, but in reverse. We just need to do the opposite of what we do now. Instead of watching corporations acquire each other and get bigger, we should be busting them apart into separate entities.
Specifically, it’s supposed to prevent business agreements and practices that are intended to hinder the ability of others to be competitive or do their own business. IOW, it prevents monopolies and industry consolidation.
Here are a few examples of why robust anti-trust laws are needed, and need to be enforced:
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Everything Walmart has ever done.
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Everything Amazon has ever done.
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ISPs preventing competitors from moving into their territory so they can keep prices artificially high and quality of service low.
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Everything Microsoft has ever done with Windows and what they’re currently trying to do with their gaming division.
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The way Apple operates their App Store.
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Everything Nestle has ever done.
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Everything Google has been doing.
I mean just look at the state of the corporate world. We got here by an endless string of unhindered massive acquisitions and undercutting competitors. Now prices go up and quality of goods go down because no one can compete, and your “choice”, when there is a choice at all, is between 2 or 3 shitty products created by corporations that operate with the exact same min-max business model.
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A monopoly is also called a trust and to quote Wiki: “antitrust law is a collection of mostly federal laws that regulate the conduct and organization of businesses in order to promote competition and prevent unjustified monopolies.”
Trust busting means breaking up corporate monopoly or oligopoly.
By issuing visas, they could import a cheap workforce that might be willing to work for half of what they pay you. So everyone wins (except you, of course, but you knew that already).
I had multiple interviews with a company and was told they went so well they stopped interviewing other candidates. The interviews did go quite well. Then they hired internally.
It was a bullshit short term contract anyway, but that’s the best interview I’ve had in 3 months of searching. I don’t know if that counts as a “fake” job, but it was a huge waste of everyone’s time.
Employers must consistently make employees think that there is a reserve army of labor waiting to take their jobs, that way the employees will tolerate more abuse and will fear asking for more from their employers.
It is the same reason why the corporations fight against the implementation of social services, why “benefits” like healthcare are tied to work, and why the social services that do exist come with a work requirement.
They don’t want the unemployment rate to get too low
Yeah, no shit.
Another fun setup are the job postings put up so that a company can interview a bunch of people with no intent to hire them, claim none of the candidates are capable and then use that as evidence for the need for an H1B visa worker who they pay a cut rate salary. Good times.
Yeah I observed something similar.
Applied to a job position, got “sorry we already filled that position” back, three weeks later the job position was still listed as open.
(Yes I did fulfill the formal requirements. No I don’t think they were just nicely saying “nope”)
I’ve had so many of these, or they just send a cancellation email 5 minutes before the meeting and never contact again
I’ve been promoted and the company still had to post the job publicly for a couple weeks to satisfy internal protocol. It’s insanity.
I’m wondering if it’s why I don’t get so much as a rejection email for many of the jobs I’ve applied for. It always feels like submitting an application is just tossing it into the void but this study seems to corroborate that.
Is that why I’m having trouble finding a WFH job on Indeed? It’s so exhausting to not hear back from these companies.
It’s sofa king exhausting. Craft a cover letter and tweak the resume for each application. And still get crickets.
For the entirety of my engineering career (25+ years), I’ve been accustomed to getting an offer for every position to which I applied. This time around, something is way off. I’m at 78 applications, despite being a perfect fit for almost all of those applications. There have been only two responses, and those were for interviews, still in progress. The fake listings makes a lot sense, but I can’t help but feel that the problem is way larger than this article indicates.
Whether the cover letter or resume sucks, it’d just be nice if companies can just give you a chance.
As I was reading the article it just kept getting worse and worse:
More than 60% of those surveyed said they posted fake jobs “to make employees believe their workload would be alleviated by new workers.”
Sixty-two percent of companies said another reason for the shady practice is to “have employees feel replaceable.”
Two-thirds of companies cited a desire to “appear the company is open to external talent” and 59% said it was an effort to “collect resumes and keep them on file for a later date.”
What’s even more concerning about the results: 85% of companies engaging in the practice said they interviewed candidates for the fake jobs.
It’s missing the part where they post jobs just to show they tried to recruit locally before getting someone on a visa (lower wages + high dependency on the company).
Did OP update their post? Because this post is 99% what OP said in theirs
I’d be very interested to know what the wording was in their survey of 600 “HR managers”. Because I find it hard to believe that companies would file job posts that they never intend to fill – and then admit it in a survey. I find it more likely the Internet is trolling them
On the other hand, I would expect companies to put up job posts that they have every intention to fill if the right candidate comes along, but structure the job requiremrnts so that precisely 10 people in the entire country are fully qualified for the well-compensated position. And then complain that they can’t fill the position while collecting everyone’s resumes and getting back to a few of them saying “That position is no longer open, would you consider this one at half the salary?”
I don’t find it that hard to believe, they’re responding anonymously so they know it won’t hurt their specific company’s image, and the general message of “there’s a lot of untrustworthy bullshit out there for job seekers (so if we do make an offer you better take it because your fallback plan might be a mirage) (and, y’know what, just in general - we have all the power here and we are going to lie to you and not feel bad about it because thats normal for us, so don’t even think about complaining to anyone about it)” is one that serves all their interests
I think your “On the other hand etc.” is a pretty accurate guess at specifically how they do this, tho
I don’t find it that hard to believe, they’re responding anonymously
If they’re responding anonymously on the Internet, they could be anyone. We have no way of knowing whether they really are hiring managers, or whether the site doing this “poll” made it up for clicks. I’m skeptical of everything I read on the Internet, even if it comes to a conclusion I agree with.
Usually for a poll like this, they would make invitations to targeted respondents and provide them with secure anonymous access when they agree.
It does not provide the details, but I highly doubt the polling was done anonymously online. You’re right, that would be completely useless.
However, polling done offline also needs to be anonymized, even though it is offline and the pollster knows the identities of the participants, simply to protect them from repercussions.
Pretty sure signing over your soul is a requirement for HR positions. They do blatantly illegal things all the time and do not care. So yes, they will happily tell the truth in an anonymous survey.
They’ve grown day and happy working their post-covid skeleton crews to the bone.
Why would they want to alleviate that by paying for additional salaries?
They is not a monolith.
If they’re just doing it because their boss tells them to, why wouldn’t they admit to it in an anonymous survey?
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Can’t say I’m surprised, but holy fuck these scumbags… THIS is why every job seeker has to submit a billion fuckin applications.
… using the internet for fake bullshit? Impossible.
This is similar to when contracts go “up for bid” but they are really just going through the motions in order to appease regulators or investors. We stopped bidding on stuff years ago because of this.
I doubt they do it just to scare employees. It’s way too expensive to use this tactic without having any real savings to show.
It’s probably more likely that HR is keeping HR busy, because what else are they supposed to do when the company isn’t hiring? The explanation that it supposedly keeps employees in check seems like something HR would say to justify their own purpose.
Any (reasonable) CEO would absolutely take thee easy and actual savings of firing the HR instead of paying them to use this unproven pseudo-tactic.
That was the first thing I thought, people coming up with reasons to keep their own jobs by saying they need to keep making job posts even if they aren’t going to hire anyone, and to say that when they are ready to hire they already have applicants
It’s probably more likely that HR is keeping HR busy, because what else are they supposed to do when the company isn’t hiring?
I’m not in HR. In my experience there is good HR departments and bad HR departments. In both they were extremely busy all the time. There is a mountain of work HR does that has nothing to do with hiring and firing. Managing employee benefits, compliance with government regulations regarding workplace access, complex rules for reporting, tracking worker complaints and performance improvement plans for workers not meeting expectations.
It’s probably more nuanced than the research can show. At my work, we had a job posting and interviews and selected candidates but the job description was written long before and the management wanted a different skill set (needed more Azure experience) and so basically that job posting never came to be. It’s still being reworked and maybe it’ll actually produce an FTE but it’s a fake job posting that wasn’t meant to be.
Nuanced? That sounds like your HR/Management is just bad at their jobs. Why post an advert for a job that you won’t fill because it’s the wrong job, then actually interview people? That’s a huge waste of everyone’s time.
The first step when a role is open is to have the team review and update the job for the necessary skillset. Not doing that is a buisness process failure.
I can see from your reaction that you do not have a lot of experience with this type of thing. Not meaning to be insulting but your comment feels really naive. Jobs sometimes take 6+ months to come to a place where you can post it and get interviews. During that time lots of things can happen. In this case they needed a system administrator and during the 6 months it takes for HR to do their thing, we were given a mandate that we had to change direction as a whole and move out of the Datacenter and into the Azure cloud.
So now we needed a system admin with Azure experience but our original job did not make that a requirement. They kept the job posting and interviews in hopes that one of the people they initially selected would be a fit but sadly none of them had exposure to Azure so we had to start over.
It takes six months from “we need a new person with these skills” to “ok here’s the job posting,” ??? And if in those six months the required skills change a bit, you can’t just tweak the job posting and instead have to start over from scratch???
Your company has serious issues that are wasting everyone’s time and need to be addressed. Stop making excuses for wasting people’s time.
Hahaha if only you knew truth. Complexity is a bitch.
All you are doing here is explaining how mosiacmango is exactly correct that this is a business process failure.
[edited to remove unnecessary snark]
