Survey: 4 in 10 Businesses Have Posted a Fake Job in the Last Year

By Sarah Lynch, Inc. (TNS)

Companies are hiring—but in some cases, they might only be pretending to.

Four in 10 companies have posted a fake job in the last year, according to 649 hiring managers in a recent survey from the job-seeking site ResumeBuilder.com. Some posted just a handful, while others—13 percent—posted 75 or more. Today, eight in 10 of companies that have posted a fake job posting still have one actively listed.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, Resume Builder’s chief career advisor Stacie Haller told CBS News, but she added that it’s “being taken to a whole new level from what we’re seeing.”

Why? Hiring managers point to a few key factors: to appear that the business is growing and open to talent, to give current employees hope of a soon-to-be easing workload, and to “have employees feel replaceable.” Least commonly, hiring managers say their companies posted fake jobs to collect resumes.

And they say the tactic is paying off: 68 percent of surveyed hiring managers say that the practice has positively impacted revenue, 65 percent say it’s boosted employee morale, and a whopping 77 percent say it’s helped productivity.

But Tara Ceranic Salinas, a professor of business ethics and the department chair of management at the University of San Diego’s Knauss School of Business, warns that the boosts from this approach may be fleeting.

“Once someone finds out, it’s over,” she says. And this is a likely outcome, according to the report: 66 percent of respondents say stakeholders who were initially in the dark about this tactic—”including employees, investors, and applicants”—did ultimately learn the truth.

That lost trust can have immediate ramifications on employees, Ceranic Salinas says: “They don’t want to put in extra effort, because they don’t see any of it being actually rewarded—if the reward is just more work and being lied to.” Even more, this deception could turn away investors, she adds: “Investors don’t want to invest in a company that’s willing to lie to them. It calls everything else into question.”

And the negative consequences could last, Haller said in the report, “dissuading potential applicants from considering them in the future as viable employers.”

Once that happens, Ceranic Salinas says, employers are “going to need to convert those fake jobs to real jobs pretty quickly.”

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