I literally saw a job on LinkedIn that started with “Must have 30+ years experience…”, then gave a highly specific laundry list of requirements and was only open for 3 days. It was obvious that was a mandated post for an internal promotion they were doing.
Hey, at least that is so obvious nobody is going to waste their time applying.
…and then lays off 10-20% of the workforce, followed by posting some more ghost openings to make the shareholders comfortable
For those wondering, this literally happens in the corporate world where for whatever reason, there are either rules or laws that require other candidates be vetted even when you’re promoting from within. I’ve seen it first hand more than once.
Sometimes management already has someone in mind for a job but corporate policy is it must be posted. Hiring is always a risk and people will try and derisk by hiring a known quantity but for those who don’t know this already they are going through the already arduous task of applying for something they were never going to get.
Not sure about this situation but I know my company interviews for jobs in order to get redundancy picks. Interviewed someone for a position that had already been hired for, then three weeks before they job was supposed to start the guy phoned and said he wasn’t going to continue with the company for the position. The person that was interviewed late got a call back and hired.
We hire for a short term seasonal job and people screw us over all the time by accepting the job and then continuing to look for a better one and bailing at the last minute, so we have to interview a lot of people as backup options. Had three people bail last minute this year, one of which we didn’t have enough time to re-hire for and had no backups so now we have to try and cover it on top of our normal duties which is a big strain.
Those application fees are a source of revenue for the company!
You should lick their shoes and thank them for giving you a chance of interview.
What’s worse is the reverse and it happens more often: Posting a job and then hiring from outside rather than promoting from within.
Because no manager wants to lose their low paid competent worker. So instead they hire the outside person for the senior position.
I worked at a shitty movie theatre for years and was promised an assistant general manager position - as in, showed my name tag with the position. Learned both front and back of house, worked literal 100 hour weeks (no OT, no benefits because “entertainment industry.”
Instead, they hired a random sociopathic woman who was lazy and did nothing at all. Not only verbally abusive, but also physically assaulted me. Absolutely tanked morale and they started hemorrhaging employees.
Yep. At one point my company tried to hire an architect from outside to lead our engineering team. Our software is very complicated, even ignoring the codebase and only looking at the business use cases. It takes years before people become somewhat familiar with it.
That guy noped out after three months and literally gave the product’s complexity as the main reason. Complete waste of money.
They eventually promoted one of our senior devs instead and he absolutely killed it. Modernized much of the codebase and dev processes because we were still acting like a startup at the time. It’s insane they just didn’t go with him from the beginning. He saved the company many millions of dollars that will never show up on a bean counter’s spreadsheet.
My leading hypothesis is “management is stupid”. It explains a lot of this sort of thing.
Management lives in a different reality. I’ve never worked in a back office environment, but everywhere I have worked even “hands on” middle and upper management tends to stay in their bubble. On the rare occasion they do site visits there’s plenty of warning, so store managers scrimp on labor during the leadup and then overstaff relative to normal conditions to make sure everything looks perfect. It is very difficult for middle management and up to get a clear picture of what is actually happening because there’s no incentive to be honest. Being honest actually gets you punished, because when everyone else lies honesty makes you look incompetent.
Not necessarily…a lot of places will only hire from within so they don’t actually have to pay market prices to attract outside talent.
As far as people I want to violate most, HR of Spectrum is top of the list. They fired me for using the bathroom of my preferred gender. Not technically. Technically, I used the “wrong” bathroom before being grilled for hours on end by HR and security to be let off on a technicality they forced in skillful manner. Y’know, they forced me to contradict myself on my interview when it was a bullshit question. Still got fired. I’ll molest HR til the end of days because of that, because I know they’re fucking people harder than me.
in government positions, search is sometimes mandated.
i once competed for a job for which i was the current temporary contractor, and they asked me to write the job description.
somehow i got the job. does that count?
Companies in a private sector do similar things in Europe just to demonstrate that there was some hiring process even though they already knew who they wanted to hire.
I can see how thst’s kind of productive assuming they needed a template for the job description so they could use it in future if you quit
They’re called position descriptions and just about every job in fed gov has one, probably a third of them are standardized, and other third are just lightly modified standard PDs.
I think mandating search is good but they should have a clause for a case like yours
I mean, technically they didn’t make anyone apply…
They didn’t make them apply.
They made them apply FOR A POSITION THAT WASNT ACTUALLY AVAILABLE.
yw
Oh no I’m serious replying to a meme
Obviously this happens a lot but people get big mad at unions because they think this is happening and it isn’t necessarily.
The job may be posted internally and externally at the same time. All internal candidates who apply must be assessed first and replied to in order of what union they belong to depending on the job. If can take a long time because people kind of just apply to everything the same way you do as an external candidate.
Once they are all excluded then HR releases the external applicants for review. At no point are they compared with each other. Not all qualified candidates are contacted because there are probably dozens of them, so maybe the top 5 or so will be invited for the evaluation.
It’s shitty that there are people who don’t have work, but I get grumpy when people yell NEPOTISM and other things. If we wanted to hire an internal candidate unethically we could and it wouldn’t get posted externally. If we knew there were wrong internal candidates and we were doing things by the book we would post internal only. No one wants to deal with HR to get things posted externally, I promise.
No one wants to deal with HR to get things posted externally, I promise.
Sure you could take a sentence in a reply explaining a very specific scenario and apply it to every situation, but that would be foolish and a waste of time.
“Ghost jobs are actually not scams. They’re from real companies, but they are openings that don’t actually exist,”
Lol, wat?
In other words they’re not employment scams whose goal is to get your money.
They are ‘scams’ in the fact they’re not real jobs, they are essentially stealing your data under false pretenses, but because capital owns the western world, not people, media that likes not spending its entire revenue in court can’t legally call that a scam.
