This is straight up fraud. I believe that one of the reasons companies do this is to signal business growth to prospects and investors. For public companies, that’s a form of securities fraud. I observed this firsthand when doing a job search a few years ago. I would apply to new job listings as soon as they were published. After not hearing a response I would check in to see if the listing was still active. I would frequently see the exact same listing reappear every six weeks or so. I watched this cycle repeat for more than a year with some companies. Each time the job is re-listed, the clock resets on networks like LinkedIn. It creates the illusion of fresh business activity and growth. One specific company that did this was Snowflake. To clarify, I am directly accusing Snowflake of securities fraud.

This is near the top of the list of the stupidest ideas I’ve ever heard.

If a talented person applies to your fake job and you ghost them or string them along, they are not going to apply again when you might have needed them.

After all you already told them that you think they suck.

I've definitely felt this. I have applied to quite a few roles that I am highly qualified for and get the "we selected someone else" email and then see the role posted again a few weeks later. I wouldn't necessarily expect to get every job I apply for, but I would expect to get a screening interview for most of them.

Resume Builder, which offers résumé templates, surveyed nearly 650 hiring managers in May and found nearly seven in 10 said it was "morally acceptable" to post fake jobs.

So 70% of HR people have done or are doing this.

Hiring managers credited the move with increasing revenue, morale, and how much workers get done.

How does this increase revenue? Isnt this a giant waste of time? Unless there was some ulterior motive ofc, and the APPEARANCE of hiring needs to be in tact.

About seven in 10 of the fake jobs were on a company website or LinkedIn, according to the survey. And, yet, despite all the shenanigans, many fake listings often lead to real interviews — and even employment.

MANY!!!!! Like, 3.

Four in 10 hiring managers said they always contacted workers who applied for made-up jobs. Forty-five percent said they sometimes contacted those job seekers. Among companies that contacted applicants, 85% report interviewing the person.

"A lot of them are getting contacted and interviewed at some point, so it's not necessarily a black box," Haller said.

Again, this maintains the APPEARAMCE of hiring without actually hiring. From what I had read before, there are some business loans that have certain hiring requirements that make this necessary.

Also, the other commenter mentioned its for pushing American jobs to foreign H1B visa jobs.

Whatever the case, its fucked up.

May the fleas of 1000 camels infest their armpits

There's another angle on this too related to H1B Visa hires.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38875758

I can tell you this, many people apply and interview where I work, but no one gets hired.

Those are talent captures. A lot of times managers have enough budget to barely hire someone but don't really have the need to justify a guaranteed expenditure. They put out a job opening to see who applies. If a rockstar applies, they'll hire them just to get them into the company. Good people will always find a spot. If a bunch of normal people, who might be just fine workers but aren't standouts, apply then the fake job doesn't get filled.

I've canceled very real job openings because the quality of people who applied didn't really excite me and I didn't really NEED someone. My team was chugging along and I had a little extra budget to help out, but my team continued just fine without hiring someone else. My budget got cut the next year by about what I would have spent on the new person, which would have made me get rid of a normal person while a rockstar would have been able to move somewhere else in the company.

Here's the weird part though-

Four in 10 hiring managers said they always contacted workers who applied for made-up jobs. Forty-five percent said they sometimes contacted those job seekers. Among companies that contacted applicants, 85% report interviewing the person.

Does that part make sense to anyone?

This strikes me less as fraud and more as a way to stay open to talent that you may not need immediately but still want to be able to add to your organization, in an era when basically nobody sends unsolicited resumes anymore. Like, maybe you don't have a project in need of a Whatever Specialist right now, but it's a field your company works in, and if a really exceptional Whatever Specialist is on the market, you don't want to miss the opportunity to bring them on.

My mother works in HR, she told me a story I didn't retain too much of, long story short someone she's interviewing thought the job was for a higher salary because they saw a freebooted job post.

I think some recruiting firm (that probably shares an office with IRS scammers) posted my mother's job post with a higher salary so they could offer that candidate to my mother.

HR could be gathering intel on current market conditions, like what salaries people are expecting, etc.

A similar thing happens at the company I just joined. It has a "move fast" culture. I push for new roles that are genuinely needed now. My boss "approves", but finance puts the brakes on for review. HR doesn't want me yelling at them, so they post the job to "get a jump on collecting resumes".

If I lose the battle with finance, the job evaporates. If I win, we scoop up the resumes, and hire someone within a week.

Could be that the paperwork for putting together a job ad is a pain, so they just reuse an old one. So maybe the title or position details change.