21 ms·

Jobs you're applying to might not be real

234 points by clockworksoul 3y ago

dentemple 3y ago
As a current job seeker, this certainly _feels_ right. But how true is it in actuality? Is anyone able to confirm or deny this practice (at least anecdotally) for companies they've been at?
- tymscar 3y ago
  Im also looking for a job and this does seem very much the case, and I have some hints based on the ways they answer, the exact timeframe between companies with nothing in common and how often they update their listing amongst other things. I’m thinking of writing a blog post about my experience in the past half a year of searching because it is insane what the market has become.
  - reactordev 3y ago
    With AI it's only going to get worse. Fake companies with fake interviewers to get samples of your voice so they can fake you as a remote employee somewhere. I feel job boards and social media and the like aren't ready for the onslaught of fakes coming like a tsunami from scammers. I could be wrong. I'm wary of even talking on the phone anymore to numbers I don't know.
    - voakbasda 3y ago
      This is next level nefarious, but an entirely believable prediction of what’s to come in this area. Voiceprint theft will become a huge problem beyond just job seeking, and this line of thinking has given me a whole new list of reasons to never pick up the phone (or start disguising my voice).
- plz-remove-card 3y ago
  The place I used to work at only a few years ago rarely had an updated careers page, it took an act of congress to get something added/removed it was almost always wrong (jobs that didn't exist, that were filled, and openings that weren't listed) Just looked and my current employer has an opening on the careers page that I know for a fact we're not hiring for at the moment.
- maerF0x0 3y ago
  it's long been common knowledge that companies will keep active listings hoping to catch a unicorn employee, but generally not actually hiring reasonably good candidates. It's also a form of status/competition "we're hiring" says you're successful and growing to VCs, potential customers, employees who might be laid off next week etc.
- hlfshell 3y ago
  I can confirm that some companies leave job postings up to seem like they're thriving for optics, and/or to pacify overworked undermanned teams for a bit longer. I have had HR tell me that a candidate everyone loved interviewing for us took another offer; except that candidate messaged me on linked in thanking me for the time spent interviewing them, and thst they were disappointed we passed and what could they have done better? While I'm not a fan of reaching out to the interviewer like that, it definitely confirmed what I thought about that company; we were never going to replace the people we lost, and all those promises to hire more was never going to materialize. Unsurprisingly layoffs eventually wiped out most teams, and no, we never did hire the three missing positions. But we definitely had ads out for it.
  - naijaboiler 3y ago
    The company knows they had no money to hire. Butthe managers keep saying they are short-staffed. so they let the managers do the song and dance, only to pull the rug from underneath them when it came time to actuallly commit
  - fraaancis 3y ago
    I've known some corporate recruiters personally and I thought I'd heard most of the hiring horror stories. I have _never_ heard of this, and now I'm wondering how prevalent it is.
- shams93 3y ago
  I've seen it over and over and now you also see scraped postings for jobs from 2005, this economy is a total nightmare if you are not in the 1%.
- paxys 3y ago
  I can definitely attest that "open position" is a much more abstract concept in the tech/software industry than people think. It is rare for a company to have a slot on a specific team that they have to fill immediately. Hiring is instead more about finding generally smart people and holding on to them. So companies can afford to take as little or as much time as they want in hiring and also can hire 0 - N people for a single open position.
  - nerdponx 3y ago
    That's not been true in my experience. Engineering figures out how many people they want, finance tells them how many they'll get, and that number of people gets hired. But maybe it's true at really small early-stage companies.
    - paxys 3y ago
      Yes but that's the number they will hire department-wide over the full year vs for one position in the next two weeks.
    - noirbot 3y ago
      On the other end, that's also extremely true at large companies. My last job, all hiring was functionally locked in at the fiscal year rollover. There was no emergent need so large that the budget could allow you to hire anyone new until the next year. Didn't matter if the entire team was about to quit (and then nearly did) because of understaffing. Budget was budget.
  - justsomeoldguy 3y ago
    I’ve worked at a few companies that also are just super slow about removing job listings that get filled. There is not much incentive to drop it, and lots of different incentives of leaving it up.
    - balderdash 3y ago
      Yeah this is my experience - or even: we definitely need to hire for position x (go through all the approvals etc., post a job) then something changes and maybe we don’t need to hire the person ASAP, but maybe in ~ 6 months, and it ends up easier to leave the posting up and see what comes in with a tighter aperture (since this is now went from high to low priority) - there is actually an open rec but it’s like a 1% chance of getting hired today vs maybe a 5% chance in a few months…
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  on tech forums like cscareers its common for job seekers to post data visualizations of their search and compare them to their prior search the changing practices whether there were more ghosts or rejections doesn't tell you why so that is the limitation, as we cant fit data to match a conclusion, we have to just react to data
- nitwit005 3y ago
  The year is sometimes part of the job code. There are positions listed that are multiple years old. I work for a company with such positions listed on their website. When they do want to hire someone, another role gets created, so I suspect no one looks at the resumes submitted, except for statistics perhaps.
- sithadmin 3y ago
  Can't speak for how things are operated now that Broadcom has taken over, but when I was at VMware (departed in 2020), it was an open secret that there were job roles posted to fish for 'good candidates' that there was no immediate intention of hiring for unless a particularly valuable candidate showed up in the pipeline.
- spamizbad 3y ago
  Well, this is second hand (thankfully my company doesn't do it) but I know through friends and colleagues at other companies some places definitely are doing something like it. I've heard of it in 3 flavors: The first flavor are businesses do it so their customers/clients/investors don't get nervous - it shows they're on a growth trajectory! They have no intention of ever hiring people for these roles. The second flavor is similar to the first, but HR/internal recruiters are trying to build out a network of candidates they can cold-call at a later date when/if roles open up again (either because of turn-over or budget). The third flavor is what I'd call "whale hunting". Basically, they're only interested in very specific candidates that perfectly fit criteria and blow the interviewer away.
- gwbas1c 3y ago
  > As a current job seeker, this certainly _feels_ right. This is why I don't invest a lot of time in any specific job until I get high engagement (IE, face-to-face interviews) with people who I will be working with. I flat-out refuse to do long take-homes without good engagement on the company's end.
ageitgey 3y ago
While the article is about companies who post job options that aren't actively being hired, there's another worse issue going on with actually 100% fake job listings. Right now, there is a big issue with fraudsters pretending to be real companies and posting fake job listings in their names with fake contact info. Some job boards make this way easier than it should be. The "employee" responds and even goes through "interviews" with a fraudster, only to be asked for banking information or ask to pay fees or something like that. Then the fraudster disappears, leaving the "employee" thinking that the real company cheated them. The real company wasn't involved at all. Be careful out there if you are looking for a job. This is a very common scam right now. Verify contact information with the actual website of the company, not from a job posting.
- lnxg33k1 3y ago
  There is also another kind, job postings that then send you coupons to use some company service, i got few times like, oh thanks for applying to company distrupting travel, while you wait here a coupon to use our services
- Our_Benefactors 3y ago
  Also be aware that any job that asks you to pay them as a condition of employment is a scam. This doesn’t apply just to the scenario above but also MLM schemes for example.
- xerox13ster 3y ago
  Maybe I'm an exceptionally paranoid person (high probability) but I would never ever ever send payment or my payment info if I am looking for a job. I will input that into a HRM application like Workday or ADP, but no salary could convince me to give up that information directly before I've signed legal paperwork like a contract or tax documents. What I'm far more concerned about with totally fake job listings are the foreign placement agencies that harvest data from resumes and interview native citizens to get information and terminology to prop up their foreign candidate's resume's over the native candidates. The placement agency makes their candidates look far better based on the information mined from the resumes and interviews, they learn how to speak about technology they don't fully understand. The employee gets a placement, the Business gets a cheap H1B indentured worker, and the Agency gets a fatter commission for selling a "more qualified" candidate.
reactordev 3y ago
The issue I have with this is that humans are not resources like businesses want to think they are. They are living beings with, gasp, memory. If I applied to a job I thought I was a great fit for, got a call with an initial recruiter, only to be ghosted - I'm going to remember that when they call 6-12mo later. By then I'd have already found a new gig with something tangible and have already ramped up on it, I'm no longer in the pool. Likewise for folks who are employed but looking. They'll keep searching until they land their exit. Again, by then it's too late and they are no longer in the pool. If you go fishing when the fish aren't biting, you won't catch anything. If you go fishing when they are, you'll catch as much as you can carry.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  > I'm going to remember that when they call 6-12mo later. You might, but if you have a big enough pool of these people, there's a good probability that one of those people will be desperate enough to pick up that call. It's the same numbers game that causes the same market power asymmetry across all of labor.
  - r0m4n0 3y ago
    Eh depends on how dirty they did you. I have a few that I will never forget.
  - IsoldesKnight 3y ago
    I'm not sure that going for the candidates who are desperate enough is the winning strategy.
    - charlieyu1 3y ago
      For the HR it is another KPI filled
  - commandlinefan 3y ago
    > one of those people will be desperate enough It's the prisoner's dilemma - if we all did it, we could effect real change. If somebody else defects, you're just hurting yourself.
SN76477 3y ago
I've searched for months (project manager LFG) Job seekers are facing a broken, emergent system. The combination of fake listings, ghosting, and generic emails that provide no feedback seems almost designed to hold them back. There are a few tricks to learn, but without insider knowledge, they may remain undiscovered. I spend over 20 hours a week searching, tailoring my resume, and submitting applications, only to receive minimal responses. This is demoralizing, not to mention the stress from diminished income.
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  And those same employers will scream from the mountaintops that workers don't exist and the only solution is to import more labor from places that just happen to have far lower wages.
  - rapind 3y ago
    In fact some employers will create listings with very specific requirements they have no intention of filling so that they can site it during visa applications. I actually don't know if this is still a thing, but it was absolutely happening back in the early 2000s. In order to sponsor a TN visa you needed to show several months of trying to find local talent to fill the position. The only proof you actually needed was dated classified ads. Bad actors always ruin best intentions.
    - jltsiren 3y ago
      Most employment-based green cards for people already in the country require a fake job listing. If a company is willing to go through the trouble of sponsoring a green card for an existing employee, they are obviously not interested in hiring a replacement. But the government makes them pretend they are, because there are no other ways of keeping the employee. There are some exceptions, such as EB-1s and tenure-track faculty positions, but fake job ads are the norm. This reminds me of how things sometimes work in totalitarian states. Some everyday things are effectively impossible to do by the rules. The government does not enforce the rules, because it wants the activity to continue. But when they decide they don't like someone, they can start enforcing selectively and show that the undesirable person is breaking the law.
tharmas 3y ago
And politically its the classic excuse: "so many jobs we can't fill, therefore we need more immigration". Immigration is to keep the wages down. There is no shortage of workers. Its a lie.
- kemotep 3y ago
  How do you feel about internal migration? Like people moving from rural areas to urban areas for work? The classic, Kansas to New York or California? Does that kind of migration of workers suppress wages? Why or why not? Does remote work suppress wages since one can live in a remote location with low costs compared to the Bay Area?
  - subpixel 3y ago
    > Does that kind of migration of workers suppress wages? Why or why not When Sam from Kansas moves to LA he gets paid the local rate and switching jobs is hassle-free. That isn't true of sponsored visa employees - I think that's the parent commenter's point.
    - kemotep 3y ago
      Why shouldn’t a sponsored visa employee be paid the same? LA costs the same whether you are a citizen of the US or not. Do we know for a fact we all suddenly would get pay raises if all migrants were deported and we stopped handing out visas? Is it a given that all visa holders are paid less than their local equivalent? Would the requirement to pay any visa holder the same as a local candidate be a better solution than blocking people from immigrating? That way you know only the most qualified person is working that position, not the one willing to race to the bottom by working for a lower wage.
      - varjag 3y ago
        H1B sweatshops are typically operated by migrants from the same countries the peons they recruit from. They run their (to a huge extent legally captive) workforce within the social framework of their home country and usually with full understanding of the indenture situation by the workers.
scanr 3y ago
I’m surprised that this “talent hoarding” approach happens. I’d love to hear from someone who works at a company that does it. My experience in tech has been that to hire a good employee is expensive. Consuming time from recruiters, HR and hiring managers. Companies that I’ve worked at that don’t currently require people often lay off the recruiters and HR folk as they scale down hiring.
qwertyuiop_ 3y ago
The solution to this is a simple state level regulation that any job posted have a unique ID, an expiry date and disposition reason. And make quarterly disposition reports available to the state. Boom !
- justsomeoldguy 3y ago
  Like how car ads at bargain prices require the vin to be shown on the ad. There really may only be one car at that price but at least this way you know it’s not completely fake.
Log_out_ 3y ago
Could auto filter those via internet. Archive?
SMAAART 3y ago
I have a question for head hunters: when there's a job post that says "COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL" and nothing else, is this really a confidential search or something else? TIA
- MisterBastahrd 3y ago
  A lot of jobs never make it to the boards directly, or if they do, they're not listed with company names because it just opens up the position to more recruiters calling in to client managers. A recruiter will usually discuss the client with you directly so that you aren't double submitting yourself, though.
- Plasmoid 3y ago
  99% of the time they just want to prevent you from applying to the company directly.
  - Balgair 3y ago
    In my experience, the 1% of the time it's not is with DoD clients, specifically with clearance jobs. If the job description does not specifically call out a security clearance level that is required, then they're just covering.
  - dxxvi 3y ago
    I think it's true. In those case, when they ask me for my rate expectation, my answer is "it's confidential".
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  sometimes it's because they plan on firing someone once they hire a replacement, but don't want the employee being fired to see the posting and put it together that their days are numbered because they still depend on them. Also means you'd be walking into a situation where you're taking over a role that the company critically relied on.
Arisaka1 3y ago
I've been unemployed for the last 5 months and finally managed out of sheer luck to land a gig that sounded sweet on the outside but it's hell in the inside, and I really need the money. But I digress. My experience with job search (Europe) has been full of companies calling me for an HR screener that will promptly inform me that they're on a hiring freeze. Some of them did it at the start of our discussion, some deferred it until the very end. Not only did this affected my psychology but also my prep. At first, I would reach out to people working at the companies I had an interview with, get the inside scoop. I'd get positive impressions from their engineers, some friendlier than others. All good. Then, as time went on I started singing "let it go" and gave up on reaching out and researching entirely, or I'd half-assed it because everything suddenly sounded too good to be true. Last but not least, you can tell which companies do that if you follow their Linkedin career page and notice that their job ads receive less applicants over time. It's almost as if people receive it via word of mouth, that or everyone interested is tired of it. But I know a guy who got the door and still ensures that he'll like and share everything they post on Linkedin, in spite of the fact that he's so good that he got offers from Apple and Microsoft before he even graduated, but turned them down for personal reasons. That is why I stick to the hell that managed to crack a door slightly open to be hired. If people like him have issues, there's a downturn, and companies can afford to play talented candidates like a fiddle who would even hire my 40-year old junior-mid ass to do backend?
- wyclif 3y ago
  Man, do I feel this reply. This pretty much describes exactly where I'm at right now, except that I'm still searching. I've tried everything, including dropping everything except the most recent roles off my CV to accentuate the fact that I've kept up and I'm not a "dinosaur" or "grey beard."
- ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
  Not using chatgpt and a voice cloner is just lazyness at this point
angarg12 3y ago
I don't know about fake jobs, but as a ML Engineer looking, my experience has been appalling, despite all the AI/ML hype. I'm tempted to write a blog post about it, but the highlights are: * More than half of recruiters ghosted me at different stages of the process. * Many companies are unreasonably strict with their requirements, asking for x years of experience in their exact tech stack as a deal breaker. * Pay is much lower than my current company even for more senior roles. * Some positions are just ridiculous. One of them asked for a ML Engineer with experience in React to maintain a website. Another was completely unable to answer what their business do or what the responsibilities of the role are. Overall a far cry of the narrative of ML Engineers fending off recruiters who throw wads of cash trying to recruit them.
- glial 3y ago
  It's brutal on the hiring side too, FWIW. I'm getting lots of "cover letters" that are written to other orgs, e.g. Hugging Face.
  - lifestyleguru 3y ago
    After addressing the companies correctly and compiling latex CV for the specific posting, the smartypants will still find repulsive three months of a gap here and there and few failed trial periods... so here it is - "Dear McCompanyFace, ....".
    - wormius 3y ago
      "Yeah, Karen, I took 3 months, cuz I would like to enjoy life while I can and not have to wait til I'm 90 and frail and dying before I get time to myself. I'm responsible enough with my money I can do so, I see that as a benefit, but you do you. See ya, hope you find a more satisfying job that can see hope and potential in people and liberated desires instead of being chained to that desk and wanting others to suffer just as much as you."
      - wyclif 3y ago
skeptrune 3y ago
this is a ghost article zero actual substance
- Hnrobert42 3y ago
  Agreed. There was nary a speck of evidence. Just a lot of conjecture. Sure, it sounds plausible, so what?
  - Joel_Mckay 3y ago
    While obvious it is mostly a LLM generated article, the premise is not false. 1. Con artists socially engineer for resumes for valid data (citing the North Korean worker influx into the gig economy, and various credit scams) 2. Many staffing agency positions are inconsistent with corporate postings. They do this as our corporate legal agreements have an encumbrance requiring we toss duplicate applicants. Thus we can't directly hire anyone also using the same service. Personally I learned this very early in my career, when you find out you are the lowest paid sucker in the room because you entered through agencies. 3. Roughly 23 out of the 350+ local staffing agencies are actually licensed in my town. Its a thread no one wants to tug... 4. unethical research: most wonks don't tell site users their intent is misrepresented. Under the local privacy laws it is a crime to farm data, but folks building goofy "AI HR filters" will waste strangers time too. Only sociopaths get excited hitting people when they are vulnerable. 5. I think it is funnier when former employees/peers leave for bigger opportunities, and people just use their resume reference contact section to identify you as a possible hire. CVs are often not used as intended friend... it is often illegal... but few care... =)
  - karpatic 3y ago
    The comments here support the conjecture. So, there's that.
nunez 3y ago
Indeed. Fake job listings are extremely pervasive and are created for tons of reasons, like: - H1B recruiting - Legal/government requirement - Corporate requirement - Headcount justification, and more. This is why "applying" by talking to recruiters and hiring managers directly and having them guide you through the application process is significantly more efficient.
- not2b 3y ago
  Yes, it seems that since the market for print ads collapsed, the San Jose Metro (a free alt-weekly) is mainly being propped up by job ads that appear to be fake, to satisfy H1B requirements (see? we advertised this position and got no US citizen takers). There are a lot of them.
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  > This is why "applying" by talking to recruiters and hiring managers directly and having them guide you through the application process is significantly more efficient. Agreed, and I'd like to give credit where it's due. Earlier this week I talked with an nVidia recruiter, and I swear it was like having a concierge service for their application / interview process.
  - noirbot 3y ago
    I guess that's the way in at nVidia then, because I applied to 10+ positions that I was decidedly well-qualified for, and haven't heard anything at all in over 4 months now. To anyone considering applying there, I guess try whatever OP did to get a recruiter, because applying on their site is a waste of your time and won't even get you a form email back.
    - CoastalCoder 3y ago
      Sorry, that sucks. Maybe I just got lucky then.
    - jonnycoder 3y ago
      I’ve applied to 20+ nvidia sr software engineer jobs since february of last year and every single one had an internal manager referral (former colleague at another company). I got 3 interviews. The hiring managers were nice, but they just had so many other applicants to choose from that I never made it past the first interview.
briffle 3y ago
> Once upon a time, a posting that’s been open for a while might be a red flag. Now, Salemi encourages job seekers to apply anyway. If you do get an interview, ask about the company’s hiring timeline. Of course, that only works if you value your time at $0/hour. Applying for jobs for all the different sites, formats, cover letters, requirements, etc, is hard work. And the sites that upload your resume, then ask you to basically type it all back in as part of the application process can all go to hell..
kqr 3y ago
An explanation that isn't brought up by the article is plain mismanagement. I briefly ran a platform/SRE team that desperately needed another hire to keep up with the constant stream of interrupting demands from the rest of the organisation while simultaneously being able to dig its way out of the bad conditions that lead to constant interruptions in the first place. Everyone I talked to in the company (including the interim CTO, finance, and HR) agreed this was a good idea and I had a solid plan for how to do it. I put out all the feelers, wrote kick-ass job ads, got many applications, interviewed some and sent short initial tests to some. Did more in-depth interviews with a few. Then when it came to discussing concrete relocation plans, benefits, etc. with HR, I got ghosted – by my own HR department! When they finally sat down with me, it was to explain that no, we cannot hire $applicant_category because $bullshit_reason. "But if you find someone within the smaller category we can allow, go ahead!" So that narrowed down the field and I almost had to start over entirely. And then the same thing happened again! They always found a reason not to hire whatever great person I had discovered. I think in the end – months later – they admitted they didn't want to hire for that position anyway and took down the job ad from the company site. By that point I had realised what a weird place that organisation was and started leaving it.
- mdorazio 3y ago
  Was this a small company? Getting confirmation from HR of an available headcount and budget is usually step 1 in a hiring manager’s process.
  - kqr 3y ago
    It was in the hundreds of employees, but upper management liked to run it as if it was in the thousands. I don't know which of those answers is more meaningful as an answer to your question. Either way, HR was completely on board right up until I had a good candidate! They were actually very helpful to begin with, assisting me in summarising information about the company, sorting out potential legal issues ahead of time, finding places to publish job ads, etc.
    - charlie0 3y ago
pflenker 3y ago
This is the appropriate place to share the following anecdote, which happened to a friend of mine (disclaimer - in the context of this comment and how I wrote it I assume you will immediately notice the red flags, but I assure you these are only obvious in hindsight) My friend applied for, and got hired as, an external tester. The idea is: you get a web page and a task (e.g. order item xyz), you perform the task and you fill out a usability report, for example explaining which things you found obvious or where you ran into issues. The gig went fine for a week or two with dozens of assignments per day for all kinds of things. Then one of the tasks included opening a bank account at Bank X. This went fine without an issue, and my friend had to use personal data to open that account. She didn’t think any of it - at this point the trust level was high and after all she was supposed to test from an end users perspective, so it kind of made sense to her. Way later she was asked to apply for a loan, and she did. Of course she did not provide any personal details, but the data the company provided to her - but given how much time had passed she didn’t realize that these data were from the bank account she had opened in her own name. The money arrived, the attackers took it and vanished. As far as I can tell the scam was set up in a very sophisticated way, faking not only the job but the whole company, with the clear idea that only luring in one innocent person would be enough. And they succeeded. The worst thing besides the financial damage is the shame that comes with it, the „I can’t believe this happened to me“ moment - which is why I share this here: scams can happen to anybody, including your friends who „should know better“, including you.
- notyourwork 3y ago
  Hindsight? When I test our app, I don't use my CC, I ask the company for one or for mock data that would pass through the production system. I would never use my personal information to tie my personal finances to my employer for a work task. That's just setting yourself up for problems like your friend found.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
    Considering how much personal data you have to give to a legitimate employer, seems like the scammers just invoked a lot of unnecessary effort in making the applicant fill out the loan paperwork themselves.
c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago
Over the past year or so, I’ve seen job ads on LinkedIn that have salaries well above market for specific roles. The same company is always listing different types roles (CTO, PM, etc). Definitely feels like a honeypot to harvest applicant data.
justanorherhack 3y ago
Another thing I've run into is fake postings to fulfill h1b requirements. I don't fully understand the requirements but sometimrs companies have to have attempted to fill a role for a year before they can bring in somebody else. I interviewed with a Company recently that was American based but 90% of management and staff as far as I could tell were Indian. The hr rep on the opening screen call was overly hostile and skeptical. It was clear he hadn't actually read my resume until the meeting and then proceed to try to poke holes in my resume. Made subtlety rude comments throughout the whole thing. It felt like I was being provoked or neged. I think outside of glass door reviews there is little to no accountability for companies during this process. I started recording (single party state) all my interviews with monosnap and automatic call recording via ringcentral. I've been thinking of making a blog post with a highlights reel.
- aatd86 3y ago
  The nerve to post a fake job ad, and interview you someone just to gaslight them. That's actually somewhat funny. Creative bullying of a whole new level.
- dxxvi 3y ago
  I think it's a time-wasting game (personally, I'm ready to play that game with all those companies). I think that finally those companies will quit that game before we do. Reason: the number of those companies is much less than the number of people looking for jobs. For example, if I waste 30 mins applying for a job, doing interviews at company X, then that company X must waste at least 15 mins to process my application and conduct an interview.
  - rvba 3y ago
    You assume they even read them. Probably they dont
- a_bonobo 3y ago
  I've also run (and even participated in!) in academia. In academia (at least the country I was in), it's very hard to move up a salary level. There's a lengthy internal, for higher levels even an external, review process with letters of support that have to be written, a panel that meets only every few months, etc. Going from academic level A to B can take six months. It's far faster to have your supervisor create a level B position hypertailored to you and have you apply, for me that took less than half the time. No letters of support, only one interview panel, you can finish all prerequisites in a few weeks. Plus your supervisor gets to, as it's called in OP's article, 'talent-hoard'; there might be a good CV coming through for a future position.
archsurface 3y ago
This has been going on for decades.
alakep 3y ago
I’ll admit that my company posts jobs to show strength to customers, partners, and competitors despite not actively hiring. My rationale is that if people actually cared enough to reach out to me personally (we are tiny startup) I would respond honestly. And yes, if the perfect person came around I would hire them on the spot.
- asynchronous 3y ago
  Irregardless this feels immoral if not somewhere illegal.
danjac 3y ago
Job postings are mostly just fraudulent, out-of-date, or oddly over-specific and generally a waste of time for applicants who don't have an insider track through their network or a recruiter. Yes I hear "apply anyway, nobody meets 100% of the requirements!" but unless there happens to be a developer shortage in that area we all know this is horseshit. Unless you have the insider track you are more likely than not to just end up in the reject pile. It doesn't matter how skilled you think you are, your resume won't even get looked at. Plus, if everyone just applies for everything, it compounds the problem: a company has hundreds or thousands of applicants without any means to know which are genuine or not. Perhaps we should collectively give up on job postings and treat them with the contempt they deserve. Maybe a better approach - other than using your network, assuming you have one - is to put your resume up on your own site or blog and use some SEO for visibility, or maybe we should pool resources to create a simple "hire me" site that recruiters can quickly find people (something better than the awfulness of Linkedin anyway).
w10-1 3y ago
The main driver is not HR wanting a back-up's or the company mollifying investors but a reduction in the power of mid-level managers. Before, headcount was basically owned by the manager, and s/he filled positions to maintain their headcount. Now, headcount is always provisional, and typically discouraged. Managers protect themselves by reducing their headcount through attrition. So actually hiring takes sustained effort by a strong manager. The bar is very high because businesses know that hiring one person costs $millions over the typical employee lifecycle.
- neon_electro 3y ago
  Costs $millions, but is the employer assuming the employee won’t provide a BENEFIT of $millions through their labor? I strongly believe that despite being paid six figures, the value of my labor is saving my EMPLOYER upwards of six figures by not having to hire expensive consultants with costs that double what mine are.
Roark66 3y ago
No shit and water is wet too. I thought this is common knowledge recruiters did that since there was recruiting. Of course they will, why? Because one of the jobs recruiters might do is cold calling, or otherwise contacting companies that are not working with them yet. The conversation usually goes something like this "what positions are you having trouble filling? Oh, really? I have 30 high quality candidates on file that are looking for that position today. I can send it to you in an hour if your company signs a contract with me/us." And they do, how? They'll invent jobs and advertise them. Usually they'll not even contact anyone that's applied. Then depending on level of integrity of a given recruiter they might just ring/contact the candidate when they really have a position to apply them to (that's fine in my book) or much worse they'll just "tweak the cv" and apply. They might justify it to themselves as "I'm not expecting these 20 people to get the job, I'm just padding the resume of my star 21st candidate I did talk to" etc. Sadly this practice impacts everyone especially candidates. Imagine you get "ghost" applied like this to a position and you really apply directly or through another honest recruiter. The company will not touch you at all, because they'd have to pay twice the recruitment fees. Or imagine instead of just deleting stuff that's irrelevant the other recruiter decided to "spruce up", your CV? Now it's look like you're lying to your prospective employer... I'm not here to demonise recruiters. A huge majority of these I worked with during my over 2 decades of work have been honest, but dishonesty exists in some industries to such extent many recruiters I worked with in the UK for example wanted me to sign on paper they are my chosen recruiter exclusively for this position (protecting themselves from another recruiter posting my CV without my knowledge and contesting the fees).
arwhatever 3y ago
If one were in charge of feature design at a prominent job posting website, how would you brainstorm to detect ghost job listings, even if only probabilistically?
John23832 3y ago
I'll also say linkedin jobs is basically unusable. It's filled with pages of "Promoted" jobs with 100's of applicants. I'm sure most are still filled, or being filled with the list they already have. If you're a current job searcher (which I'm currently not thank god), you can't make progress. These jobs never get back to you if you apply.
- neonlights84 3y ago
  I am so glad to see someone else say this. LinkedIn jobs is utter garbage. I'll search for a particular skill keyword (a skill that I'm uniquely good at) and I'll get dozens of postings (promoted and otherwise) that have no mention of that skill at all. And a crapton of posting in other states. No, LinkedIn jobs, I'm not interested in being an OTR driver or a sales representative. I'm a goddamn engineer. Meanwhile I'm able to use search filters just fine in other job sites like Indeed.com.
caseysoftware 3y ago
Oh man. "Ghost jobs" are 100% real. I interviewed dozens of candidates for a couple roles last year that ended up not being real. Once I finally realized it, I was pissed. Not only was I wasting my time but we were wasting their time and burning my credibility. I remember looking at an event last year where I'd interviewed 20% of the presenters. :(
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
When I had my first round of Vocational Rehab around 2013, I was paired with an expert coach from a specialty agency. We arranged a series of meetings at a coffeehouse; she was able to counsel me on the search, application and interview process, we honed my résumé, and she guided me through the whole process until I secured employment. One thing that distressed me at the outset was that the front page of her handout packet was an exhaustive list of job aggregator boards. I was sort of intimidated, like she wanted me to sign up for accounts on all these, fill out profiles, upload résumé, and just sort of roll the dice? That was a lot of privacy invasion for diminishing returns. I had hoped that an expert job coach would be able to help me target desirable employers more accurately. One thing I've learned about job aggregator boards: they should only be used as a guide. Once you find a job on there, you go back to the original employer's job board and you find the job listing in its pristine form. You can apply direct there without bothering the whole "job board" process. It's really effective, because nine times out of ten, you'll find that the position has been withdrawn or modified and the "job board" version of that listing is a zombie. Also if you're looking for contract or short-term professional employment, it can be effective to go through an agency. There are reputable agencies and there are fly-by-nights. I found that the best ones had physical office presence near me, and I could go in and be seen by a real person. Some even had qualification testing right on-site. Some of them were really busy with pavement-pounders and some were sleepy little offices with an empty waiting room. The thing about agencies is, they won't be able to disclose stuff until you consent and move forward. You won't know who their client is, or the pay rates or the site location, until you really need to know and you're approved by all parties. So it can be difficult when they're holding all the cards. It takes a little faith and trust that your agency/recruiter knows your background well, and can reliably negotiate a really good match. In fact I did land my current job in the midst of the pandemic lockdowns by way of LinkedIn "1-click applications". I am still not sure that I directly applied to this company, but I think they found my résumé/profile on LinkedIn, and cold-called me. So glad they did! 95% of your job hunt is about networking. If you have a connection and an introduction, don't bother slogging through job boards as another fish in the pond. Find someone who knows someone. Develop your personal brand and put yourself out there. Don't chase ghost jobs but get good at ATS forms, and use those direct-to-employer corporate "Careers" websites as stepping stones. You'll get noticed!
greendestiny_re 3y ago
As someone who's been on Upwork as a freelancer for 10 years, I'm glad to be ahead of the curve. Clients can still post job openings where they hire nobody but their hiring stats are visible and I can filter out "0 hires" ones. I can only imagine how much healthier the job market would be if employers had to do the same.
- charlieyu1 3y ago
  Is Upwork worth it? I tried and even the most basic jobs get like 10+ proposals and filled by someone who will work for $5/hr
  - greendestiny_re 3y ago
    Upwork is worth it if you are willing to make it your full-time job in order to make a profile that will catch the eye of high-quality clients. The basic job proposal spam you described is designed to keep low-quality clients and freelancers engaged and feeding the platform with money. Contact me over on Reddit (u/SgtBrutalisk) and I will give you some tips on how to start.
ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
People need to recognize that wasting your time is STEALING. No matter how it's done. And they need to respond accordingly.
- tacheiordache 3y ago
  Scamming is also stealing. Go catch the perpetrators, prove they scammed and so on. Not saying it isn't possible but it's a gargantuan task.
  - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
    It sure is. Not enough hours in a day or a lifetime, unfortunately. So... I report the bullshit listings to LinkedIn or whoever; AKA yell at a cloud. Or THE cloud, in fact.
charlieyu1 3y ago
Glad or sad to see I’m not alone. The only job I got last year was through a platform where both sides need to pay. At least there are less people screwing around
- phendrenad2 3y ago
  What platform is this?
aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> But the most common type of ghost job is talent hoarding. > “You keep postings out there. You collect a large pool of resumes. You may, in fact, make contact with candidates and interview them, just so you have a large pool of talent,” said Kaplan. “But you don’t plan on actually filling the job anytime soon or hiring.” [...] > “It gives you a pool that you can very quickly ramp back up,” said Kaplan. In my opinion this talent hoarding does not make any sense: if you reject a (talented) candidate, he will in all likelihood look for a job somewhere else. Thus when the economy grows again, the respective candidate will likely not available anymore for hiring, because he surely has a job elsewhere (except you are willing to pay an insane salary that is much larger than the candidate's current salary).
t-3 3y ago
Yeah, it's well-known that people will fill out anything if they're desperate and an "authority figure" (like a potential employer) asks for it. Nobody expects to get a reply from an online job advertisement, so silently collecting information this way works, but the same format is also used for recruiting (both knowing and unknowing) middlemen for money laundering and various fraud schemes.
red-iron-pine 3y ago
got an old college roommate in HR, now a VP of HR. we were talking about this a decade ago (he wasnt a VP then). his team would throw out fake adverts and see what bites. how many hits, and how qualified. their ATS allowed for fields like expected salary, so they could take the temperature of the market and see how many hits, and for how much $$$, they'd get for any particular job. No scams, just no response. Presumably they purged the PII at some point.
- jeffrallen 3y ago
  The only answer to expected salary is "market rate", and the only response when the JavaScript validation refuses non digits is closing the tab.
comprev 3y ago
There are adverts for jobs and interviews rounds done to simply tick the box they have "attempted recruitment outside the company". This happened to me. To start the ball rolling I had to unofficially accept a job which did not yet exist. Once they had interviewed a few external candidates they offered me the role without any interview. Only thing I had to do was "apply" to the job via intranet. Only ever happened to me once though and genuinely felt guilty about the other candidates.
- DonsDiscountGas 3y ago
  I've had similar things happen, although I was an external candidate. But for whatever reason they needed to post the job again, have me apply again, and then I'd get hired. Which is what happened. What a weird way to start.
barrenko 3y ago
Fake jobs are non-obviously fake, but the bigger issue is the "real" jobs that are non-obviously fake.
cute_boi 3y ago
This practice should have been illegal.
ebfe1 3y ago
Sad to see so many people getting scam these days, One of the idea I have and wish someone could take the time to implement is a self-registering platform where you can declare your information was previously stolen and used in a scam - The system will hash this information in multiple way, without storing them, such that, banks, financial institutions, or even mobilephone providers (think sim swap attack) can submit some users information and said system would come back with a result based on some matching of hashes(eg first name, dob, address or last name, dob, social security number). Ideally, it would result in the banks doing more vigorous check on user's identity like actually seeing them in person if this check fails rather than taking everything submitted over some web-form as is. I have had family member who had their identity stolen for many years and it kept on going, it's super frustrating.
RecycledEle 3y ago
If lying on a resume is fraud, then lying in a want ad is fraud.

234 points by clockworksoul 3y ago

As a current job seeker, this certainly _feels_ right. But how true is it in actuality? Is anyone able to confirm or deny this practice (at least anecdotally) for companies they've been at?

tymscar 3y ago
Im also looking for a job and this does seem very much the case, and I have some hints based on the ways they answer, the exact timeframe between companies with nothing in common and how often they update their listing amongst other things. I’m thinking of writing a blog post about my experience in the past half a year of searching because it is insane what the market has become.
- reactordev 3y ago
  With AI it's only going to get worse. Fake companies with fake interviewers to get samples of your voice so they can fake you as a remote employee somewhere. I feel job boards and social media and the like aren't ready for the onslaught of fakes coming like a tsunami from scammers. I could be wrong. I'm wary of even talking on the phone anymore to numbers I don't know.
  - voakbasda 3y ago
    This is next level nefarious, but an entirely believable prediction of what’s to come in this area. Voiceprint theft will become a huge problem beyond just job seeking, and this line of thinking has given me a whole new list of reasons to never pick up the phone (or start disguising my voice).
plz-remove-card 3y ago
The place I used to work at only a few years ago rarely had an updated careers page, it took an act of congress to get something added/removed it was almost always wrong (jobs that didn't exist, that were filled, and openings that weren't listed) Just looked and my current employer has an opening on the careers page that I know for a fact we're not hiring for at the moment.
maerF0x0 3y ago
it's long been common knowledge that companies will keep active listings hoping to catch a unicorn employee, but generally not actually hiring reasonably good candidates. It's also a form of status/competition "we're hiring" says you're successful and growing to VCs, potential customers, employees who might be laid off next week etc.
hlfshell 3y ago
I can confirm that some companies leave job postings up to seem like they're thriving for optics, and/or to pacify overworked undermanned teams for a bit longer. I have had HR tell me that a candidate everyone loved interviewing for us took another offer; except that candidate messaged me on linked in thanking me for the time spent interviewing them, and thst they were disappointed we passed and what could they have done better? While I'm not a fan of reaching out to the interviewer like that, it definitely confirmed what I thought about that company; we were never going to replace the people we lost, and all those promises to hire more was never going to materialize. Unsurprisingly layoffs eventually wiped out most teams, and no, we never did hire the three missing positions. But we definitely had ads out for it.
- naijaboiler 3y ago
  The company knows they had no money to hire. Butthe managers keep saying they are short-staffed. so they let the managers do the song and dance, only to pull the rug from underneath them when it came time to actuallly commit
- fraaancis 3y ago
  I've known some corporate recruiters personally and I thought I'd heard most of the hiring horror stories. I have _never_ heard of this, and now I'm wondering how prevalent it is.
shams93 3y ago
I've seen it over and over and now you also see scraped postings for jobs from 2005, this economy is a total nightmare if you are not in the 1%.
paxys 3y ago
I can definitely attest that "open position" is a much more abstract concept in the tech/software industry than people think. It is rare for a company to have a slot on a specific team that they have to fill immediately. Hiring is instead more about finding generally smart people and holding on to them. So companies can afford to take as little or as much time as they want in hiring and also can hire 0 - N people for a single open position.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  That's not been true in my experience. Engineering figures out how many people they want, finance tells them how many they'll get, and that number of people gets hired. But maybe it's true at really small early-stage companies.
  - paxys 3y ago
    Yes but that's the number they will hire department-wide over the full year vs for one position in the next two weeks.
  - noirbot 3y ago
    On the other end, that's also extremely true at large companies. My last job, all hiring was functionally locked in at the fiscal year rollover. There was no emergent need so large that the budget could allow you to hire anyone new until the next year. Didn't matter if the entire team was about to quit (and then nearly did) because of understaffing. Budget was budget.
- justsomeoldguy 3y ago
  I’ve worked at a few companies that also are just super slow about removing job listings that get filled. There is not much incentive to drop it, and lots of different incentives of leaving it up.
  - balderdash 3y ago
    Yeah this is my experience - or even: we definitely need to hire for position x (go through all the approvals etc., post a job) then something changes and maybe we don’t need to hire the person ASAP, but maybe in ~ 6 months, and it ends up easier to leave the posting up and see what comes in with a tighter aperture (since this is now went from high to low priority) - there is actually an open rec but it’s like a 1% chance of getting hired today vs maybe a 5% chance in a few months…
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yieldcrv 3y ago
on tech forums like cscareers its common for job seekers to post data visualizations of their search and compare them to their prior search the changing practices whether there were more ghosts or rejections doesn't tell you why so that is the limitation, as we cant fit data to match a conclusion, we have to just react to data
nitwit005 3y ago
The year is sometimes part of the job code. There are positions listed that are multiple years old. I work for a company with such positions listed on their website. When they do want to hire someone, another role gets created, so I suspect no one looks at the resumes submitted, except for statistics perhaps.
sithadmin 3y ago
Can't speak for how things are operated now that Broadcom has taken over, but when I was at VMware (departed in 2020), it was an open secret that there were job roles posted to fish for 'good candidates' that there was no immediate intention of hiring for unless a particularly valuable candidate showed up in the pipeline.
spamizbad 3y ago
Well, this is second hand (thankfully my company doesn't do it) but I know through friends and colleagues at other companies some places definitely are doing something like it. I've heard of it in 3 flavors: The first flavor are businesses do it so their customers/clients/investors don't get nervous - it shows they're on a growth trajectory! They have no intention of ever hiring people for these roles. The second flavor is similar to the first, but HR/internal recruiters are trying to build out a network of candidates they can cold-call at a later date when/if roles open up again (either because of turn-over or budget). The third flavor is what I'd call "whale hunting". Basically, they're only interested in very specific candidates that perfectly fit criteria and blow the interviewer away.
gwbas1c 3y ago
> As a current job seeker, this certainly _feels_ right. This is why I don't invest a lot of time in any specific job until I get high engagement (IE, face-to-face interviews) with people who I will be working with. I flat-out refuse to do long take-homes without good engagement on the company's end.

ageitgey 3y ago

While the article is about companies who post job options that aren't actively being hired, there's another worse issue going on with actually 100% fake job listings. Right now, there is a big issue with fraudsters pretending to be real companies and posting fake job listings in their names with fake contact info. Some job boards make this way easier than it should be. The "employee" responds and even goes through "interviews" with a fraudster, only to be asked for banking information or ask to pay fees or something like that. Then the fraudster disappears, leaving the "employee" thinking that the real company cheated them. The real company wasn't involved at all. Be careful out there if you are looking for a job. This is a very common scam right now. Verify contact information with the actual website of the company, not from a job posting.

lnxg33k1 3y ago
There is also another kind, job postings that then send you coupons to use some company service, i got few times like, oh thanks for applying to company distrupting travel, while you wait here a coupon to use our services
Our_Benefactors 3y ago
Also be aware that any job that asks you to pay them as a condition of employment is a scam. This doesn’t apply just to the scenario above but also MLM schemes for example.
xerox13ster 3y ago
Maybe I'm an exceptionally paranoid person (high probability) but I would never ever ever send payment or my payment info if I am looking for a job. I will input that into a HRM application like Workday or ADP, but no salary could convince me to give up that information directly before I've signed legal paperwork like a contract or tax documents. What I'm far more concerned about with totally fake job listings are the foreign placement agencies that harvest data from resumes and interview native citizens to get information and terminology to prop up their foreign candidate's resume's over the native candidates. The placement agency makes their candidates look far better based on the information mined from the resumes and interviews, they learn how to speak about technology they don't fully understand. The employee gets a placement, the Business gets a cheap H1B indentured worker, and the Agency gets a fatter commission for selling a "more qualified" candidate.

reactordev 3y ago

The issue I have with this is that humans are not resources like businesses want to think they are. They are living beings with, gasp, memory. If I applied to a job I thought I was a great fit for, got a call with an initial recruiter, only to be ghosted - I'm going to remember that when they call 6-12mo later. By then I'd have already found a new gig with something tangible and have already ramped up on it, I'm no longer in the pool. Likewise for folks who are employed but looking. They'll keep searching until they land their exit. Again, by then it's too late and they are no longer in the pool. If you go fishing when the fish aren't biting, you won't catch anything. If you go fishing when they are, you'll catch as much as you can carry.

nerdponx 3y ago
> I'm going to remember that when they call 6-12mo later. You might, but if you have a big enough pool of these people, there's a good probability that one of those people will be desperate enough to pick up that call. It's the same numbers game that causes the same market power asymmetry across all of labor.
- r0m4n0 3y ago
  Eh depends on how dirty they did you. I have a few that I will never forget.
- IsoldesKnight 3y ago
  I'm not sure that going for the candidates who are desperate enough is the winning strategy.
  - charlieyu1 3y ago
    For the HR it is another KPI filled
- commandlinefan 3y ago
  > one of those people will be desperate enough It's the prisoner's dilemma - if we all did it, we could effect real change. If somebody else defects, you're just hurting yourself.

SN76477 3y ago

I've searched for months (project manager LFG) Job seekers are facing a broken, emergent system. The combination of fake listings, ghosting, and generic emails that provide no feedback seems almost designed to hold them back. There are a few tricks to learn, but without insider knowledge, they may remain undiscovered. I spend over 20 hours a week searching, tailoring my resume, and submitting applications, only to receive minimal responses. This is demoralizing, not to mention the stress from diminished income.

Mountain_Skies 3y ago
And those same employers will scream from the mountaintops that workers don't exist and the only solution is to import more labor from places that just happen to have far lower wages.
- rapind 3y ago
  In fact some employers will create listings with very specific requirements they have no intention of filling so that they can site it during visa applications. I actually don't know if this is still a thing, but it was absolutely happening back in the early 2000s. In order to sponsor a TN visa you needed to show several months of trying to find local talent to fill the position. The only proof you actually needed was dated classified ads. Bad actors always ruin best intentions.
  - jltsiren 3y ago
    Most employment-based green cards for people already in the country require a fake job listing. If a company is willing to go through the trouble of sponsoring a green card for an existing employee, they are obviously not interested in hiring a replacement. But the government makes them pretend they are, because there are no other ways of keeping the employee. There are some exceptions, such as EB-1s and tenure-track faculty positions, but fake job ads are the norm. This reminds me of how things sometimes work in totalitarian states. Some everyday things are effectively impossible to do by the rules. The government does not enforce the rules, because it wants the activity to continue. But when they decide they don't like someone, they can start enforcing selectively and show that the undesirable person is breaking the law.

tharmas 3y ago

And politically its the classic excuse: "so many jobs we can't fill, therefore we need more immigration". Immigration is to keep the wages down. There is no shortage of workers. Its a lie.

kemotep 3y ago
How do you feel about internal migration? Like people moving from rural areas to urban areas for work? The classic, Kansas to New York or California? Does that kind of migration of workers suppress wages? Why or why not? Does remote work suppress wages since one can live in a remote location with low costs compared to the Bay Area?
- subpixel 3y ago
  > Does that kind of migration of workers suppress wages? Why or why not When Sam from Kansas moves to LA he gets paid the local rate and switching jobs is hassle-free. That isn't true of sponsored visa employees - I think that's the parent commenter's point.
  - kemotep 3y ago
    Why shouldn’t a sponsored visa employee be paid the same? LA costs the same whether you are a citizen of the US or not. Do we know for a fact we all suddenly would get pay raises if all migrants were deported and we stopped handing out visas? Is it a given that all visa holders are paid less than their local equivalent? Would the requirement to pay any visa holder the same as a local candidate be a better solution than blocking people from immigrating? That way you know only the most qualified person is working that position, not the one willing to race to the bottom by working for a lower wage.
    - varjag 3y ago
      H1B sweatshops are typically operated by migrants from the same countries the peons they recruit from. They run their (to a huge extent legally captive) workforce within the social framework of their home country and usually with full understanding of the indenture situation by the workers.

scanr 3y ago

I’m surprised that this “talent hoarding” approach happens. I’d love to hear from someone who works at a company that does it. My experience in tech has been that to hire a good employee is expensive. Consuming time from recruiters, HR and hiring managers. Companies that I’ve worked at that don’t currently require people often lay off the recruiters and HR folk as they scale down hiring.

qwertyuiop_ 3y ago

The solution to this is a simple state level regulation that any job posted have a unique ID, an expiry date and disposition reason. And make quarterly disposition reports available to the state. Boom !

justsomeoldguy 3y ago
Like how car ads at bargain prices require the vin to be shown on the ad. There really may only be one car at that price but at least this way you know it’s not completely fake.

Log_out_ 3y ago

Could auto filter those via internet. Archive?

SMAAART 3y ago

I have a question for head hunters: when there's a job post that says "COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL" and nothing else, is this really a confidential search or something else? TIA

MisterBastahrd 3y ago
A lot of jobs never make it to the boards directly, or if they do, they're not listed with company names because it just opens up the position to more recruiters calling in to client managers. A recruiter will usually discuss the client with you directly so that you aren't double submitting yourself, though.
Plasmoid 3y ago
99% of the time they just want to prevent you from applying to the company directly.
- Balgair 3y ago
  In my experience, the 1% of the time it's not is with DoD clients, specifically with clearance jobs. If the job description does not specifically call out a security clearance level that is required, then they're just covering.
- dxxvi 3y ago
  I think it's true. In those case, when they ask me for my rate expectation, my answer is "it's confidential".
Scoundreller 3y ago
sometimes it's because they plan on firing someone once they hire a replacement, but don't want the employee being fired to see the posting and put it together that their days are numbered because they still depend on them. Also means you'd be walking into a situation where you're taking over a role that the company critically relied on.

Arisaka1 3y ago

I've been unemployed for the last 5 months and finally managed out of sheer luck to land a gig that sounded sweet on the outside but it's hell in the inside, and I really need the money. But I digress. My experience with job search (Europe) has been full of companies calling me for an HR screener that will promptly inform me that they're on a hiring freeze. Some of them did it at the start of our discussion, some deferred it until the very end. Not only did this affected my psychology but also my prep. At first, I would reach out to people working at the companies I had an interview with, get the inside scoop. I'd get positive impressions from their engineers, some friendlier than others. All good. Then, as time went on I started singing "let it go" and gave up on reaching out and researching entirely, or I'd half-assed it because everything suddenly sounded too good to be true. Last but not least, you can tell which companies do that if you follow their Linkedin career page and notice that their job ads receive less applicants over time. It's almost as if people receive it via word of mouth, that or everyone interested is tired of it. But I know a guy who got the door and still ensures that he'll like and share everything they post on Linkedin, in spite of the fact that he's so good that he got offers from Apple and Microsoft before he even graduated, but turned them down for personal reasons. That is why I stick to the hell that managed to crack a door slightly open to be hired. If people like him have issues, there's a downturn, and companies can afford to play talented candidates like a fiddle who would even hire my 40-year old junior-mid ass to do backend?

wyclif 3y ago
Man, do I feel this reply. This pretty much describes exactly where I'm at right now, except that I'm still searching. I've tried everything, including dropping everything except the most recent roles off my CV to accentuate the fact that I've kept up and I'm not a "dinosaur" or "grey beard."
ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
Not using chatgpt and a voice cloner is just lazyness at this point

angarg12 3y ago

I don't know about fake jobs, but as a ML Engineer looking, my experience has been appalling, despite all the AI/ML hype. I'm tempted to write a blog post about it, but the highlights are: * More than half of recruiters ghosted me at different stages of the process. * Many companies are unreasonably strict with their requirements, asking for x years of experience in their exact tech stack as a deal breaker. * Pay is much lower than my current company even for more senior roles. * Some positions are just ridiculous. One of them asked for a ML Engineer with experience in React to maintain a website. Another was completely unable to answer what their business do or what the responsibilities of the role are. Overall a far cry of the narrative of ML Engineers fending off recruiters who throw wads of cash trying to recruit them.

glial 3y ago
It's brutal on the hiring side too, FWIW. I'm getting lots of "cover letters" that are written to other orgs, e.g. Hugging Face.
- lifestyleguru 3y ago
  After addressing the companies correctly and compiling latex CV for the specific posting, the smartypants will still find repulsive three months of a gap here and there and few failed trial periods... so here it is - "Dear McCompanyFace, ....".
  - wormius 3y ago
    "Yeah, Karen, I took 3 months, cuz I would like to enjoy life while I can and not have to wait til I'm 90 and frail and dying before I get time to myself. I'm responsible enough with my money I can do so, I see that as a benefit, but you do you. See ya, hope you find a more satisfying job that can see hope and potential in people and liberated desires instead of being chained to that desk and wanting others to suffer just as much as you."
    - wyclif 3y ago

skeptrune 3y ago

this is a ghost article zero actual substance

Hnrobert42 3y ago
Agreed. There was nary a speck of evidence. Just a lot of conjecture. Sure, it sounds plausible, so what?
- Joel_Mckay 3y ago
  While obvious it is mostly a LLM generated article, the premise is not false. 1. Con artists socially engineer for resumes for valid data (citing the North Korean worker influx into the gig economy, and various credit scams) 2. Many staffing agency positions are inconsistent with corporate postings. They do this as our corporate legal agreements have an encumbrance requiring we toss duplicate applicants. Thus we can't directly hire anyone also using the same service. Personally I learned this very early in my career, when you find out you are the lowest paid sucker in the room because you entered through agencies. 3. Roughly 23 out of the 350+ local staffing agencies are actually licensed in my town. Its a thread no one wants to tug... 4. unethical research: most wonks don't tell site users their intent is misrepresented. Under the local privacy laws it is a crime to farm data, but folks building goofy "AI HR filters" will waste strangers time too. Only sociopaths get excited hitting people when they are vulnerable. 5. I think it is funnier when former employees/peers leave for bigger opportunities, and people just use their resume reference contact section to identify you as a possible hire. CVs are often not used as intended friend... it is often illegal... but few care... =)
- karpatic 3y ago
  The comments here support the conjecture. So, there's that.

nunez 3y ago

Indeed. Fake job listings are extremely pervasive and are created for tons of reasons, like: - H1B recruiting - Legal/government requirement - Corporate requirement - Headcount justification, and more. This is why "applying" by talking to recruiters and hiring managers directly and having them guide you through the application process is significantly more efficient.

not2b 3y ago
Yes, it seems that since the market for print ads collapsed, the San Jose Metro (a free alt-weekly) is mainly being propped up by job ads that appear to be fake, to satisfy H1B requirements (see? we advertised this position and got no US citizen takers). There are a lot of them.
CoastalCoder 3y ago
> This is why "applying" by talking to recruiters and hiring managers directly and having them guide you through the application process is significantly more efficient. Agreed, and I'd like to give credit where it's due. Earlier this week I talked with an nVidia recruiter, and I swear it was like having a concierge service for their application / interview process.
- noirbot 3y ago
  I guess that's the way in at nVidia then, because I applied to 10+ positions that I was decidedly well-qualified for, and haven't heard anything at all in over 4 months now. To anyone considering applying there, I guess try whatever OP did to get a recruiter, because applying on their site is a waste of your time and won't even get you a form email back.
  - CoastalCoder 3y ago
    Sorry, that sucks. Maybe I just got lucky then.
  - jonnycoder 3y ago
    I’ve applied to 20+ nvidia sr software engineer jobs since february of last year and every single one had an internal manager referral (former colleague at another company). I got 3 interviews. The hiring managers were nice, but they just had so many other applicants to choose from that I never made it past the first interview.

briffle 3y ago

> Once upon a time, a posting that’s been open for a while might be a red flag. Now, Salemi encourages job seekers to apply anyway. If you do get an interview, ask about the company’s hiring timeline. Of course, that only works if you value your time at $0/hour. Applying for jobs for all the different sites, formats, cover letters, requirements, etc, is hard work. And the sites that upload your resume, then ask you to basically type it all back in as part of the application process can all go to hell..

kqr 3y ago

An explanation that isn't brought up by the article is plain mismanagement. I briefly ran a platform/SRE team that desperately needed another hire to keep up with the constant stream of interrupting demands from the rest of the organisation while simultaneously being able to dig its way out of the bad conditions that lead to constant interruptions in the first place. Everyone I talked to in the company (including the interim CTO, finance, and HR) agreed this was a good idea and I had a solid plan for how to do it. I put out all the feelers, wrote kick-ass job ads, got many applications, interviewed some and sent short initial tests to some. Did more in-depth interviews with a few. Then when it came to discussing concrete relocation plans, benefits, etc. with HR, I got ghosted – by my own HR department! When they finally sat down with me, it was to explain that no, we cannot hire $applicant_category because $bullshit_reason. "But if you find someone within the smaller category we can allow, go ahead!" So that narrowed down the field and I almost had to start over entirely. And then the same thing happened again! They always found a reason not to hire whatever great person I had discovered. I think in the end – months later – they admitted they didn't want to hire for that position anyway and took down the job ad from the company site. By that point I had realised what a weird place that organisation was and started leaving it.

mdorazio 3y ago
Was this a small company? Getting confirmation from HR of an available headcount and budget is usually step 1 in a hiring manager’s process.
- kqr 3y ago
  It was in the hundreds of employees, but upper management liked to run it as if it was in the thousands. I don't know which of those answers is more meaningful as an answer to your question. Either way, HR was completely on board right up until I had a good candidate! They were actually very helpful to begin with, assisting me in summarising information about the company, sorting out potential legal issues ahead of time, finding places to publish job ads, etc.
  - charlie0 3y ago

pflenker 3y ago

This is the appropriate place to share the following anecdote, which happened to a friend of mine (disclaimer - in the context of this comment and how I wrote it I assume you will immediately notice the red flags, but I assure you these are only obvious in hindsight) My friend applied for, and got hired as, an external tester. The idea is: you get a web page and a task (e.g. order item xyz), you perform the task and you fill out a usability report, for example explaining which things you found obvious or where you ran into issues. The gig went fine for a week or two with dozens of assignments per day for all kinds of things. Then one of the tasks included opening a bank account at Bank X. This went fine without an issue, and my friend had to use personal data to open that account. She didn’t think any of it - at this point the trust level was high and after all she was supposed to test from an end users perspective, so it kind of made sense to her. Way later she was asked to apply for a loan, and she did. Of course she did not provide any personal details, but the data the company provided to her - but given how much time had passed she didn’t realize that these data were from the bank account she had opened in her own name. The money arrived, the attackers took it and vanished. As far as I can tell the scam was set up in a very sophisticated way, faking not only the job but the whole company, with the clear idea that only luring in one innocent person would be enough. And they succeeded. The worst thing besides the financial damage is the shame that comes with it, the „I can’t believe this happened to me“ moment - which is why I share this here: scams can happen to anybody, including your friends who „should know better“, including you.

notyourwork 3y ago
Hindsight? When I test our app, I don't use my CC, I ask the company for one or for mock data that would pass through the production system. I would never use my personal information to tie my personal finances to my employer for a work task. That's just setting yourself up for problems like your friend found.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
  Considering how much personal data you have to give to a legitimate employer, seems like the scammers just invoked a lot of unnecessary effort in making the applicant fill out the loan paperwork themselves.

c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago

Over the past year or so, I’ve seen job ads on LinkedIn that have salaries well above market for specific roles. The same company is always listing different types roles (CTO, PM, etc). Definitely feels like a honeypot to harvest applicant data.

justanorherhack 3y ago

Another thing I've run into is fake postings to fulfill h1b requirements. I don't fully understand the requirements but sometimrs companies have to have attempted to fill a role for a year before they can bring in somebody else. I interviewed with a Company recently that was American based but 90% of management and staff as far as I could tell were Indian. The hr rep on the opening screen call was overly hostile and skeptical. It was clear he hadn't actually read my resume until the meeting and then proceed to try to poke holes in my resume. Made subtlety rude comments throughout the whole thing. It felt like I was being provoked or neged. I think outside of glass door reviews there is little to no accountability for companies during this process. I started recording (single party state) all my interviews with monosnap and automatic call recording via ringcentral. I've been thinking of making a blog post with a highlights reel.

aatd86 3y ago
The nerve to post a fake job ad, and interview you someone just to gaslight them. That's actually somewhat funny. Creative bullying of a whole new level.
dxxvi 3y ago
I think it's a time-wasting game (personally, I'm ready to play that game with all those companies). I think that finally those companies will quit that game before we do. Reason: the number of those companies is much less than the number of people looking for jobs. For example, if I waste 30 mins applying for a job, doing interviews at company X, then that company X must waste at least 15 mins to process my application and conduct an interview.
- rvba 3y ago
  You assume they even read them. Probably they dont
a_bonobo 3y ago
I've also run (and even participated in!) in academia. In academia (at least the country I was in), it's very hard to move up a salary level. There's a lengthy internal, for higher levels even an external, review process with letters of support that have to be written, a panel that meets only every few months, etc. Going from academic level A to B can take six months. It's far faster to have your supervisor create a level B position hypertailored to you and have you apply, for me that took less than half the time. No letters of support, only one interview panel, you can finish all prerequisites in a few weeks. Plus your supervisor gets to, as it's called in OP's article, 'talent-hoard'; there might be a good CV coming through for a future position.

archsurface 3y ago

This has been going on for decades.

alakep 3y ago

I’ll admit that my company posts jobs to show strength to customers, partners, and competitors despite not actively hiring. My rationale is that if people actually cared enough to reach out to me personally (we are tiny startup) I would respond honestly. And yes, if the perfect person came around I would hire them on the spot.

asynchronous 3y ago
Irregardless this feels immoral if not somewhere illegal.

danjac 3y ago

Job postings are mostly just fraudulent, out-of-date, or oddly over-specific and generally a waste of time for applicants who don't have an insider track through their network or a recruiter. Yes I hear "apply anyway, nobody meets 100% of the requirements!" but unless there happens to be a developer shortage in that area we all know this is horseshit. Unless you have the insider track you are more likely than not to just end up in the reject pile. It doesn't matter how skilled you think you are, your resume won't even get looked at. Plus, if everyone just applies for everything, it compounds the problem: a company has hundreds or thousands of applicants without any means to know which are genuine or not. Perhaps we should collectively give up on job postings and treat them with the contempt they deserve. Maybe a better approach - other than using your network, assuming you have one - is to put your resume up on your own site or blog and use some SEO for visibility, or maybe we should pool resources to create a simple "hire me" site that recruiters can quickly find people (something better than the awfulness of Linkedin anyway).

w10-1 3y ago

The main driver is not HR wanting a back-up's or the company mollifying investors but a reduction in the power of mid-level managers. Before, headcount was basically owned by the manager, and s/he filled positions to maintain their headcount. Now, headcount is always provisional, and typically discouraged. Managers protect themselves by reducing their headcount through attrition. So actually hiring takes sustained effort by a strong manager. The bar is very high because businesses know that hiring one person costs $millions over the typical employee lifecycle.

neon_electro 3y ago
Costs $millions, but is the employer assuming the employee won’t provide a BENEFIT of $millions through their labor? I strongly believe that despite being paid six figures, the value of my labor is saving my EMPLOYER upwards of six figures by not having to hire expensive consultants with costs that double what mine are.

Roark66 3y ago

No shit and water is wet too. I thought this is common knowledge recruiters did that since there was recruiting. Of course they will, why? Because one of the jobs recruiters might do is cold calling, or otherwise contacting companies that are not working with them yet. The conversation usually goes something like this "what positions are you having trouble filling? Oh, really? I have 30 high quality candidates on file that are looking for that position today. I can send it to you in an hour if your company signs a contract with me/us." And they do, how? They'll invent jobs and advertise them. Usually they'll not even contact anyone that's applied. Then depending on level of integrity of a given recruiter they might just ring/contact the candidate when they really have a position to apply them to (that's fine in my book) or much worse they'll just "tweak the cv" and apply. They might justify it to themselves as "I'm not expecting these 20 people to get the job, I'm just padding the resume of my star 21st candidate I did talk to" etc. Sadly this practice impacts everyone especially candidates. Imagine you get "ghost" applied like this to a position and you really apply directly or through another honest recruiter. The company will not touch you at all, because they'd have to pay twice the recruitment fees. Or imagine instead of just deleting stuff that's irrelevant the other recruiter decided to "spruce up", your CV? Now it's look like you're lying to your prospective employer... I'm not here to demonise recruiters. A huge majority of these I worked with during my over 2 decades of work have been honest, but dishonesty exists in some industries to such extent many recruiters I worked with in the UK for example wanted me to sign on paper they are my chosen recruiter exclusively for this position (protecting themselves from another recruiter posting my CV without my knowledge and contesting the fees).

arwhatever 3y ago

If one were in charge of feature design at a prominent job posting website, how would you brainstorm to detect ghost job listings, even if only probabilistically?

John23832 3y ago

I'll also say linkedin jobs is basically unusable. It's filled with pages of "Promoted" jobs with 100's of applicants. I'm sure most are still filled, or being filled with the list they already have. If you're a current job searcher (which I'm currently not thank god), you can't make progress. These jobs never get back to you if you apply.

neonlights84 3y ago
I am so glad to see someone else say this. LinkedIn jobs is utter garbage. I'll search for a particular skill keyword (a skill that I'm uniquely good at) and I'll get dozens of postings (promoted and otherwise) that have no mention of that skill at all. And a crapton of posting in other states. No, LinkedIn jobs, I'm not interested in being an OTR driver or a sales representative. I'm a goddamn engineer. Meanwhile I'm able to use search filters just fine in other job sites like Indeed.com.

caseysoftware 3y ago

Oh man. "Ghost jobs" are 100% real. I interviewed dozens of candidates for a couple roles last year that ended up not being real. Once I finally realized it, I was pissed. Not only was I wasting my time but we were wasting their time and burning my credibility. I remember looking at an event last year where I'd interviewed 20% of the presenters. :(

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago

When I had my first round of Vocational Rehab around 2013, I was paired with an expert coach from a specialty agency. We arranged a series of meetings at a coffeehouse; she was able to counsel me on the search, application and interview process, we honed my résumé, and she guided me through the whole process until I secured employment. One thing that distressed me at the outset was that the front page of her handout packet was an exhaustive list of job aggregator boards. I was sort of intimidated, like she wanted me to sign up for accounts on all these, fill out profiles, upload résumé, and just sort of roll the dice? That was a lot of privacy invasion for diminishing returns. I had hoped that an expert job coach would be able to help me target desirable employers more accurately. One thing I've learned about job aggregator boards: they should only be used as a guide. Once you find a job on there, you go back to the original employer's job board and you find the job listing in its pristine form. You can apply direct there without bothering the whole "job board" process. It's really effective, because nine times out of ten, you'll find that the position has been withdrawn or modified and the "job board" version of that listing is a zombie. Also if you're looking for contract or short-term professional employment, it can be effective to go through an agency. There are reputable agencies and there are fly-by-nights. I found that the best ones had physical office presence near me, and I could go in and be seen by a real person. Some even had qualification testing right on-site. Some of them were really busy with pavement-pounders and some were sleepy little offices with an empty waiting room. The thing about agencies is, they won't be able to disclose stuff until you consent and move forward. You won't know who their client is, or the pay rates or the site location, until you really need to know and you're approved by all parties. So it can be difficult when they're holding all the cards. It takes a little faith and trust that your agency/recruiter knows your background well, and can reliably negotiate a really good match. In fact I did land my current job in the midst of the pandemic lockdowns by way of LinkedIn "1-click applications". I am still not sure that I directly applied to this company, but I think they found my résumé/profile on LinkedIn, and cold-called me. So glad they did! 95% of your job hunt is about networking. If you have a connection and an introduction, don't bother slogging through job boards as another fish in the pond. Find someone who knows someone. Develop your personal brand and put yourself out there. Don't chase ghost jobs but get good at ATS forms, and use those direct-to-employer corporate "Careers" websites as stepping stones. You'll get noticed!

greendestiny_re 3y ago

As someone who's been on Upwork as a freelancer for 10 years, I'm glad to be ahead of the curve. Clients can still post job openings where they hire nobody but their hiring stats are visible and I can filter out "0 hires" ones. I can only imagine how much healthier the job market would be if employers had to do the same.

charlieyu1 3y ago
Is Upwork worth it? I tried and even the most basic jobs get like 10+ proposals and filled by someone who will work for $5/hr
- greendestiny_re 3y ago
  Upwork is worth it if you are willing to make it your full-time job in order to make a profile that will catch the eye of high-quality clients. The basic job proposal spam you described is designed to keep low-quality clients and freelancers engaged and feeding the platform with money. Contact me over on Reddit (u/SgtBrutalisk) and I will give you some tips on how to start.

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago

People need to recognize that wasting your time is STEALING. No matter how it's done. And they need to respond accordingly.

tacheiordache 3y ago
Scamming is also stealing. Go catch the perpetrators, prove they scammed and so on. Not saying it isn't possible but it's a gargantuan task.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  It sure is. Not enough hours in a day or a lifetime, unfortunately. So... I report the bullshit listings to LinkedIn or whoever; AKA yell at a cloud. Or THE cloud, in fact.

charlieyu1 3y ago

Glad or sad to see I’m not alone. The only job I got last year was through a platform where both sides need to pay. At least there are less people screwing around

phendrenad2 3y ago
What platform is this?

aleph_minus_one 3y ago

> But the most common type of ghost job is talent hoarding. > “You keep postings out there. You collect a large pool of resumes. You may, in fact, make contact with candidates and interview them, just so you have a large pool of talent,” said Kaplan. “But you don’t plan on actually filling the job anytime soon or hiring.” [...] > “It gives you a pool that you can very quickly ramp back up,” said Kaplan. In my opinion this talent hoarding does not make any sense: if you reject a (talented) candidate, he will in all likelihood look for a job somewhere else. Thus when the economy grows again, the respective candidate will likely not available anymore for hiring, because he surely has a job elsewhere (except you are willing to pay an insane salary that is much larger than the candidate's current salary).

t-3 3y ago

Yeah, it's well-known that people will fill out anything if they're desperate and an "authority figure" (like a potential employer) asks for it. Nobody expects to get a reply from an online job advertisement, so silently collecting information this way works, but the same format is also used for recruiting (both knowing and unknowing) middlemen for money laundering and various fraud schemes.

red-iron-pine 3y ago

got an old college roommate in HR, now a VP of HR. we were talking about this a decade ago (he wasnt a VP then). his team would throw out fake adverts and see what bites. how many hits, and how qualified. their ATS allowed for fields like expected salary, so they could take the temperature of the market and see how many hits, and for how much $$$, they'd get for any particular job. No scams, just no response. Presumably they purged the PII at some point.

jeffrallen 3y ago
The only answer to expected salary is "market rate", and the only response when the JavaScript validation refuses non digits is closing the tab.

comprev 3y ago

There are adverts for jobs and interviews rounds done to simply tick the box they have "attempted recruitment outside the company". This happened to me. To start the ball rolling I had to unofficially accept a job which did not yet exist. Once they had interviewed a few external candidates they offered me the role without any interview. Only thing I had to do was "apply" to the job via intranet. Only ever happened to me once though and genuinely felt guilty about the other candidates.

DonsDiscountGas 3y ago
I've had similar things happen, although I was an external candidate. But for whatever reason they needed to post the job again, have me apply again, and then I'd get hired. Which is what happened. What a weird way to start.

barrenko 3y ago

Fake jobs are non-obviously fake, but the bigger issue is the "real" jobs that are non-obviously fake.

cute_boi 3y ago

This practice should have been illegal.

ebfe1 3y ago

Sad to see so many people getting scam these days, One of the idea I have and wish someone could take the time to implement is a self-registering platform where you can declare your information was previously stolen and used in a scam - The system will hash this information in multiple way, without storing them, such that, banks, financial institutions, or even mobilephone providers (think sim swap attack) can submit some users information and said system would come back with a result based on some matching of hashes(eg first name, dob, address or last name, dob, social security number). Ideally, it would result in the banks doing more vigorous check on user's identity like actually seeing them in person if this check fails rather than taking everything submitted over some web-form as is. I have had family member who had their identity stolen for many years and it kept on going, it's super frustrating.

RecycledEle 3y ago

If lying on a resume is fraud, then lying in a want ad is fraud.