During the months leading up to the summer season, activity in the labour market intensifies. Filling vacancies and the seasonality of employment in our country also means that the number of job vacancies on professional portals and pages such as LinkedIn or Indeed also increases.
However, many of these vacancies will remain active for months and months. Is it because of a lack of suitable candidates? No. They are phantom job offers that never result in hiring anyone, no matter how suitable the candidates are.
The proliferation of phantom vacancies. We have already talked about phantom job offers and the serious obstacle they represent when looking for a job. However, their number has not stopped growing in recent years and it is already becoming a real problem for both candidates and job search platforms, which see their space flooded with job offers that are not really real, thus affecting their reputation. A report by the consulting firm Revelio Labs y Bloomberg estimated that an average of 50% of job offers published in the US in 2023 were fake.
Raúl Cotrina, director of business development at the human resources company Manfred, confirmed in statements to The Spanish Newspaper that this phenomenon is common in the sector. “It is very common. In all sectors there are perverse metrics and in recruiting “also.” The executive defines phantom offers as those for which the company has “zero or very low interest” in actually covering, but still keeps them open.
Why make people believe that you want to hire someone?According to Cotrina, these offers are part of perverse practices in the hiring process and reflect an internal strategy by some companies, whose objective has nothing to do with hiring new staff.
The lending institution Clarify Capital conducted a survey of more than a thousand human resources managers on the reasons for this practice.
Updated candidate pool. 50% said that their companies were “always willing to meet new people.” This is a euphemism for saying that, in reality, all they are looking for with this offer is to collect CVs from candidates in order to have a large and updated pool of candidates in case they need to fill an unexpected vacancy.
Raul Cotrina assured The Spanish Newspaper that, in addition to that reason, the human resources departments of large companies keep these phantom offers open to cover the metrics of time to hirea practice in which a company requires its HR staff to conduct a certain number of interviews with potential candidates per month even if it has no actual vacancies to fill.
In this case, this type of offer serves to fill the quota of the few interviews that take place during the “low season” for hiring, so that recruiters can justify their work.
Keeping the machinery oiledAs we pointed out in a previous article, companies use phantom job offers for show. The Clarify Capital survey indicated that 43% of recruits stated that they maintained phantom job offers to give a false image of business growth to investors, encouraging them to continue investing in their company.
On the other hand, another 43% said they kept these false offers open to maintain motivation and calm the spirits of employees who were already working for the company, under the eternal promise of looking for reinforcements that will never come. Only in 27% of cases, the offers are simply kept because the company forgets to withdraw them after having filled the vacancy.
It doesn’t speak very well of the person who publishes them.. Misleading candidates scares them away in the future. Detecting a phantom offer is not always easy, and it contributes to further lengthening the time it takes a person looking for a job to find one. According to data from InfoJobs, the average duration of the selection processes ranges between one and three months for each job offer. Candidates can only apply for a certain number of offers per day. If, as the data says, 50% of these offers are false, the time spent searching for a job doubles.
Manfred confirms on his blog that candidates are already taking action against this perception of “deception” and are beginning to veto companies that publish them, which could make it difficult for companies to find qualified staff in the future.
Detecting phantom offersEmployment platforms acknowledge that it is not always easy to detect these types of offers, but some strategies allow us to rule out a large number of them:
- According to data from Clarify Capital, vacancies tend to be filled within one to three months, so if a job offer has been posted for more than a month, it is very likely to be a phantom offer.
- Companies that use these offers to collect CVs do not specify the details of the position in order to obtain a greater variety of profiles. Therefore, if the description is very vague, does not define responsibilities or a specific project, it may not be a real vacancy.
- If it’s an offer that appears repeatedly in your list of offers, forget about it. It will probably meet the two points above.
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