That position you just applied for might be a 'ghost job' that'll never be filled

disgusting.

More data stealing. This is the most disgusting world one could imagine, and it's real life. There is a very special place in hell for these tech thugs, and the people who support them.

USA

The article says " It's likely a state matter, tax attorney Steven Chung wrote,".So, in the USA.

Is the situation here in the UK different?

H1-B shenanigans

Many of those job postings are for a job the company fully intends to fill with someone on a H1-B visa, because those visas are tied to the job and the employee does not have much flexibility to job-hop. The Department of Labor certification required for the H1-B does require the company to provide evidence the job couldn't be filled by a local, so they deliberately advertise pro forma in the most inconvenient form no one reads ever, dead-tree newspaper ads, and they can then truthfully say no one applied.

For public companies in the US, wouldn't the SEC have something to say? Surely posting imaginary job ads makes a material statement about the state and direction of the company?

That said, when I was a manager I was responsible for at least one ad that didn't get filled as intended*, at my then-employer if the req spanned a quarter it had to be re-justified and re-authorized by HR. They weren't, I guess on the premise that if you couldn't find a good match in two months it wasn't worth spending more recruiting time.

*It was a big enough company that someone in my division got hired for that req, just not for the posted role - near the end of a quarter the senior directors would shuffle to make sure they didn't lose any reqs.

Solution 1

Make it obligatory for employers to send interview schedule within 48 hours to each applicant. The schedule must be detailed enough, describing all steps, timeline and conditions. In case of rejection at any step, justification must be given immediately in a written form. The employer must conduct the scheduled interviews with minor time discrepancies.

Employers of certain size must collect the schedule statistics and display them publicly: how many applicants applied, how many interviews conducted, how many rejected at each step and why. This will enable to easily spot time wasters and help better planning.

Job ads themselves should be archived and available to see with corresponding stats to avoid frequent posting of same positions as new.

The Honeyed Man Traps of Poison Pill Pushers and Poppers?

And GCHQ/NCSC/HMGov or some Remote Shady UKGBNI Cabinet Leadership are also very fond of such phantom phishing for that which they are missing, and they are rightly to be fearful of, which does make all things quite awkward and increasingly difficult for them ........ with the likes of El Reg and commentards happy to oblige them with further details of vulnerabilities to be worried about freely shared in response to tales and situations published with this Registered one ...... Wanted. Top infosec pros willing to defend Britain on shabby salaries .... currently running point.

Secret tasking it is certainly not, surreal work it maybe probably most definitely is.

Ghost jobs ? How about ghost contracts ?

I have been self-employed since 2012. I have tried many times to get into a "government" contract because I knew that I had the required experience and competence.

Except that the contract had been explicitily written so that only one specific provider could answer and be awarded the contract.

I now have the experience to recognize those contracts and not waste my time with them, but they are nothing new.

Not by a long shot.

Definitely illegal in the UK.

This falls squarely under Section 2 of the Fraud Act 2006. "... dishonestly makes a false representation ... cause loss to another or to expose another to a risk of loss [i.e to an applicant]".

If anyone from HR or an employment agency is watching, that's worth up to 10 years in prison plus a fine.

While I agree this sucks and legislation would be helpful

Is it really all that different from people who are happy where they are and only apply to other jobs to get an offer they can use as leverage for a raise in their current position?

In the UK too.

I'm going back 30 years now, so things may have changed (I doubt it)

When I worked for the local council, they had to advertise jobs externally even when they knew the job was going to someone internal. And in most cases, it was a fair internal appointment - someone who had done well on the job, knew the job inside out, being promoted to a senior position, yet the external advert sham had to be done.

Just admit it.

Any legislation could be circumvented by calling them ghost jobs from the outset; they'd still get applicants.

CV Gathering

I recall applying for a least one role where the recruiter (agency) admitted that there wasn't a specific job on offer, they were just gathering CVs for potential future roles. Needless to say those future roles never materialised.

I've stopped applying unless the salary range is listed

I've looked at a few jobs advertising "competitive salary", passed the technical interview, for the HR droid to suggest a salary that might only be competitive in a very low wage economy. Any attempt at negotiation towards a "competitive salary" in the country of interview, gets you shown the door.

It’s an old practice

As a former HR ghoul, in a previous life, we did this regularly as far back as the 1980s.

Reasons, to put pressure on the existing staff I guess.

It's worse than that, its analysts, Jim.

Industry analysts (you know, those fun guys - or did I mean funghi?) who try and convince us that they know the industry and have more than just a plentiful supply of acronyms at their disposal will use these job postings as evidence of growth in their industry sector of choice.

Worse still, investors listen to them.

Worse still, some CEOs know investors listen to them, and create fake job ads to milk the investors.

Us Poor Bloody Infantry (to use the Gwent term) get slaughtered in the rebalancing that inevitable happens.

And round we go again.

Anonymous for obvious reasons.

Nonexistent Jobs

Even on UKGov's own 'Find a Job' website I've seen dodgy looking jobs which I'm pretty damn sure do not exist.

For example , the same job title and summary description appearing in a row with different company names and no real job descriptions, just a link to send CV and covering letter.

Look up the company names and you find websites which look for all the world like they were run up from one of those website sample templates, with poor spelling. Websites for both companies had the same postal address, but the only jobs in the careers section were in Hyderabad and Bangalore.

Neither of which are in London UK.

"Yeah right", I thought. "Those aren't real jobs, they're just fishing for CVs and contact info for dubious reasons"

This kind of thing needs vetting.

Let me tell you a tale....

Back in the Good Old Days when computers and stuff existed but we were pre-Interweb (still developing the kit for it) I was recruited by a small company who "desperately needed my services" to head up (what was left of) their firmware team. It was a good offer, the work was interesting and challenging so why not? In the office I inherited there was the usual filing cabinet full of disordered documentation etc. -- truly a cabinet of hopes and dreams so eventually when I was able to catch my breath with a bit of free time I had a poke through it. One section had resumes -- the company was too small / disorganized to have a formal HR department -- and among the pile was my own. I'd forgotten I'd sent it in practically a year before, just one more lost piece of paper.

(Note that in California you can't immediately bin resumes, by law you've got to keep them for six months or so "on file".)

Moral of tale -- resumes are primarily for the roundrile, you get jobs through contacts or recruiters. Even that may not be good enough. The last job I had dragged me out of retirement (again....) where there was apparently quite the debate about whether I was suitably qualified etc. etc. (I found out about it later). I was hired because "senior management" dropped the hammer -- "You Will Stop F**g About And Hire This Person", that sort of thing. Sending in a resume, even if I wanted the job, would have been a waste of bandwidth. I don't know why people expect to be hired for technical positions as if they were filling slots at a fast food outlet but my experience is that such jobs are probably not going to yield anything useful from a career perspective.

There is also when they lie about how many people they want, just to get more resumes.

H1B scam

Employers need unfilled positions to justify cheap/desperate H1B labor. The easiest way is fake job openings that are never filled.

Finding these fakes is as easy as asking to perform an internal transfer to an open position. You can get any number of excuses for the position not currently being available but the fake listing will remain forever. Or if you have real psychopaths in HR, they'll tell you an H1B teammate will be fired if you accept, and that may cause friction in your new team.

Some coverage on the ChangeLog podcast laid the issue squarely on the desire to look good to venture capitalists because that is one of their cheap-n-cheerful metrics.

This is nothing new (in the UK)

"or intended for internal applicants and only opened to the public for legal purposes."

This has been the case as long as I've been working (36 years).

In reality the law was a piss poor joke in the first place.

It was supposed to prevent "jobs for the boys" and "jobs for life" but all it did was fuck it up for everyone.

Say a vacancy arose for a senior bod and you have the absolute perfect junior candidate internally, looking for promotion.They have worked for years in the job, never called in sick, know the internal workings brilliantly, get on well with everyone. Perfect.

But you still have to advertise it externally, with pretty much no-one having a hope of getting it over the internal person.

You probably have to hold fake interviews to "prove" it's valid,wasting everyone's time.

If you're lucky, you may be asked to come back for the junior role.

This is a fact as I've seen it in action many, many times, even been that person that got promoted internally. I was told I had the job, before they even advertised it

I had a successful interview once, where I commented it had been a while since I'd applied via the job ad in the national press. They denied this, saying they'd found me on a recruitment site, but eventually conceded my story was true. Turned out the newspaper ad was just this kind of thing, published to legally justify the number of foreign contractors they cherrypicked and paid peanuts to. They never even looked at any applications to the newspaper ads. Needless to say this was the least of their issues.

"According to those two reports, the reasons companies post ghost jobs are, frankly, insidious." not insidious. invidious

Combat recruiting

Let's say there's some key employee at another company that I'd like to have and, at the same time, deprive that competitor of having their services. There may also be a restriction on my directly recruiting them because I used to work at that other company and there's an operative non-poaching clause I still have to abide by now that I have left and started my own company. Easy, I craft an advertisement that lists the job requirements as what this person has (degree(s), years of experience in the discipline, awards, other qualifications, language skills). Since I've advertised the position publicly, maybe I can get around any non-poaching terms. The chances of somebody else ticking all the boxes might be rather thin.

Maybe there's 3-4 people in my industry that I'd find a way of bringing in at just about any cost. There is an opening, but only if I can hook those people. I expect there is also a lot of companies casting nets to see what they can find. These days, people can be evaluated and sifted automatically so if the computer pops up somebody you'd never thought you could get, you might be in with a chance.

Sadly, this is as old as the hills

It's very common to see very high profile jobs, like, say ummm, something like, Director General of the BBC, advertised when there is absolutely no chance whatsoever of any outside applicants being accepted. In fact, many a high-powered job-op. has already been allocated to aparticular individual *before* the ads even appear.

Of course that should be made illegal. As should be the practice of making people apply for their own jobs as part of 'restructuring'. That's as old as the hills too.

Step 1: Bung a fancy advert in the paper/online/recruitment agency

Meanwhile: Make the actual selection on the golf course during a “mates day”.