Interestingly, in my profession the media is saying that they're screaming for people, my peak association is saying that we should issue Visa's for international recruitment.

That same peak body is publishing articles saying that our profession is demanding too much pay.

Meanwhile with 40 years experience, I've spent the past 30 months looking for the next opportunity, getting ignored or worse, getting told that my application won't be pursued without any explanation. Demoralising is not strong enough to convey the impact of such a response.

I speak with my peers with similar levels of experience and they're seeing exactly the same thing.

I hung my shingle out 25 years ago as an independent consultant, been through several downturns across my career, but I've never seen anything like this.

I think that we've gotten to the point where the free market has broken and government intervention is required.

I had multiple interviews with a company and was told they went so well they stopped interviewing other candidates. The interviews did go quite well. Then they hired internally.

It was a bullshit short term contract anyway, but that's the best interview I've had in 3 months of searching. I don't know if that counts as a "fake" job, but it was a huge waste of everyone's time.

Employers must consistently make employees think that there is a reserve army of labor waiting to take their jobs, that way the employees will tolerate more abuse and will fear asking for more from their employers.

It is the same reason why the corporations fight against the implementation of social services, why "benefits" like healthcare are tied to work, and why the social services that do exist come with a work requirement.

Yeah I observed something similar.

Applied to a job position, got "sorry we already filled that position" back, three weeks later the job position was still listed as open.

(Yes I did fulfill the formal requirements. No I don't think they were just nicely saying "nope")

Yeah, no shit.

Another fun setup are the job postings put up so that a company can interview a bunch of people with no intent to hire them, claim none of the candidates are capable and then use that as evidence for the need for an H1B visa worker who they pay a cut rate salary. Good times.

Is that why I'm having trouble finding a WFH job on Indeed? It's so exhausting to not hear back from these companies.

As I was reading the article it just kept getting worse and worse:

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.

I'd be very interested to know what the wording was in their survey of 600 "HR managers". Because I find it hard to believe that companies would file job posts that they never intend to fill -- and then admit it in a survey. I find it more likely the Internet is trolling them

On the other hand, I would expect companies to put up job posts that they have every intention to fill if the right candidate comes along, but structure the job requiremrnts so that precisely 10 people in the entire country are fully qualified for the well-compensated position. And then complain that they can't fill the position while collecting everyone's resumes and getting back to a few of them saying "That position is no longer open, would you consider this one at half the salary?"

These better be fake, because I'm so unbelievably disgusted at the hundreds of thousands of jobs of all professions at all experience levels offering $17-22/hr.

It's fucking disgusting.

Can't say I'm surprised, but holy fuck these scumbags... THIS is why every job seeker has to submit a billion fuckin applications.

... using the internet for fake bullshit? Impossible.

This is similar to when contracts go "up for bid" but they are really just going through the motions in order to appease regulators or investors. We stopped bidding on stuff years ago because of this.

I doubt they do it just to scare employees. It's way too expensive to use this tactic without having any real savings to show.

It's probably more likely that HR is keeping HR busy, because what else are they supposed to do when the company isn't hiring? The explanation that it supposedly keeps employees in check seems like something HR would say to justify their own purpose.

Any (reasonable) CEO would absolutely take thee easy and actual savings of firing the HR instead of paying them to use this unproven pseudo-tactic.