General Business Updates and News

[dtkvictim]

Fake job postings?  Who and why?

I've heard all kinds of reasoning

• Not wanting to replace employees who have quit (basically downsizing), but needing to appease the remaining overworked employees by promising that they are hiring without any actual intention to hire
  
• To give the impression of a successful and growing business
  
• To collect data on the current state of the labour market, and potentially to stockpile candidates for a future real opening
  
• To give the impression of an open hiring process for a position that is actually filled (i.e. given to a close friend, or even created specifically for them)
  
• While not "fake" in the same sense as the others, job postings are all scraped and replicated on dozens of different websites and may remain up many months after the position has been filled, which has the same end result for applicants
  

But the bottom line is that posting a job is borderline free these days, so any business that thinks they can benefit in any way from a fake job posting has little reason not to.

And I should clarify that I can't attest to the prevalence or validity of these, it's just what I've heard.