A new survey found that almost 40% of companies posted a fake job listing this year — and 85% of those companies interviewed candidates for fake jobs
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Companies said they are posting fake jobs for a laundry list of reasons, including to deceive their own employees.
More than 60% of those surveyed said they posted fake jobs “to make employees believe their workload would be alleviated by new workers.”
Sixty-two percent of companies said another reason for the shady practice is to “have employees feel replaceable.”
Two-thirds of companies cited a desire to “appear the company is open to external talent” and 59% said it was an effort to “collect resumes and keep them on file for a later date.”
What’s even more concerning about the results: 85% of companies engaging in the practice said they interviewed candidates for the fake jobs.
It’s probably more nuanced than the research can show. At my work, we had a job posting and interviews and selected candidates but the job description was written long before and the management wanted a different skill set (needed more Azure experience) and so basically that job posting never came to be. It’s still being reworked and maybe it’ll actually produce an FTE but it’s a fake job posting that wasn’t meant to be.
Nuanced? That sounds like your HR/Management is just bad at their jobs. Why post an advert for a job that you won’t fill because it’s the wrong job, then actually interview people? That’s a huge waste of everyone’s time.
The first step when a role is open is to have the team review and update the job for the necessary skillset. Not doing that is a buisness process failure.
I can see from your reaction that you do not have a lot of experience with this type of thing. Not meaning to be insulting but your comment feels really naive. Jobs sometimes take 6+ months to come to a place where you can post it and get interviews. During that time lots of things can happen. In this case they needed a system administrator and during the 6 months it takes for HR to do their thing, we were given a mandate that we had to change direction as a whole and move out of the Datacenter and into the Azure cloud.
So now we needed a system admin with Azure experience but our original job did not make that a requirement. They kept the job posting and interviews in hopes that one of the people they initially selected would be a fit but sadly none of them had exposure to Azure so we had to start over.
It takes six months from “we need a new person with these skills” to “ok here’s the job posting,” ??? And if in those six months the required skills change a bit, you can’t just tweak the job posting and instead have to start over from scratch???
Your company has serious issues that are wasting everyone’s time and need to be addressed. Stop making excuses for wasting people’s time.
Hahaha if only you knew truth. Complexity is a bitch.
All you are doing here is explaining how mosiacmango is exactly correct that this is a business process failure.
[edited to remove unnecessary snark]