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Comment by pyb | Hacker News Reader

Fake vacancies is a huge and underreported problem for jobseekers. It is impossible to tell just from the job description.

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I know of deep fake employment opportunities designed exclusively for identifying opportunities for IP larceny. This is a huge reason for locking down everything if you have any relatives of important people in your organisation as interns. This is the oldest privilege escalation hack I know of, and you might want to see if your outside legal will support a fake interview process for your own people via a headhunter. Reciprocal and wholly legitimate arrangements exist like this in many industries. It’s frightening how much we found we were leaking over family breakfasts in seemingly innocent ways like revealing meeting details and simply mood responses to eager-junior inquiries. Send your sons and daughters to start their own business and learn to value poker playing before they get inside the “family” business. BillG played poker rather well I’ve read...

Not sure I understand what you are denouncing ?

The fake vacancies I had in mind are not so malicious. But for the candidates, in aggregate, they are a waste of precious time and energy.

- Company has still opportunities on their website, in order to look healthy, when they are in fact laying everybody off (as is the case in the OP)

- Company publishes an offer for legal reasons, but in fact wants to hire a cheaper resource from abroad once they've "proven" that they "couldn't get any local talent"

- Company publishes non-urgent offer, in the hope to fish for resumes, and/or waits for years for the "perfect" talent to knock on their door

- Company forgot to take down vacancy, someone got hired 3 months ago

Those are all real problems but there is an insidious one where you pretend to poach an employee from a competing firm but instead just do everything you can to brain dump them during the interview.

I wonder how much of that information would be actionable though... I remember a story I heard at my last employer, one of our younger designers had brought some work home and his father, a VP for a rival company, saw his screen and exclaimed "This makes so much more sense! Why aren't we doing this?!"

But of course, they didn't start doing it like that because they had a huge workforce already trained on their own process and the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. I'm not sure how I would actually exploit a rival's meeting minutes even if I had them and no scruples.

This is almost certainly a niche issue, at best.

Got a buddy in HR, he mentioned he regularly floats fake listings to see:

1) what kind of hits they get (e.g. lots of over- or under-qualified)

2) what the salary requirements are relative to the hits they get

3) how effective are the ads in terms of writing, conveying what is on the table without saying too much, etc.

4) to make the company look busy / growing / large

5) to stay ahead of the churn, since they're large enough that they may need bodies in a few months (e.g. a poor performer is on the way out / gettin the axe, or a contract is up in 3 months) so they can get a couple of prospects on the hook and do a slow negotiation until they're ready to hire, in which case they make an offer at or near market rates

Based on recent personal experience, I expect the number of fake vacancies in software to be around 50%, if not more.

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