Fake jobs

Greg Wyatt • November 18, 2024

Picture the scene.

You’ve just gone through the emotional turmoil of losing your job. Or maybe something’s happened at work to galvanise your decision to make a change.

You take a bit of time to figure out what the right next move is - a great idea.

Then you go through the obvious channels to see what jobs are out there.

The most obvious of which are job boards and other websites which promote jobs.

Your first reaction is one of hope and optimism - there seems quite a bit out there, so maybe you’ll secure something quickly.

And if you happen to be reading this, new to a job search, indeed you may.

However, for many people in this market, comes a pretty quick realisation that a significant number of adverts do not represent jobs that exist.

A double whammy in your emotional rollercoaster of recent weeks.

Today’s article looks at what ‘fake jobs’ are and what to be mindful of. There are a few categories to go through, each with different nuance, but ultimately the outcome is the same: an advert that, at best, wastes your time.

This what we’ll go through:

  1. Scraping

  2. Relisting

  3. Laziness

  4. Evergreen vacancies

  5. Fishing

  6. Scams

  7. The disappearing act

First a quick overview from the recruiter perspective.

When you put an advert up, you may allow a bit of time for applications to come in before assessing them and starting the interview process.

Let’s say the volume is manageable, and the outcome not guaranteed, particularly when a candidate you want to offer decides to take a different job instead.

There are no villains in this common scenario, and it’s common enough that risk is a consideration when advertising.

If a recruitment process takes six weeks from advert to offer, and the outcome isn’t guaranteed, it can make sense to leave the advert up, in case you need more candidates in your pipeline.

What about if your process takes three months? Illness, holiday, lack of availability, changes - there are many reasons a process can be delayed.

There are many tools and suppliers which support a hiring process, one of which is the job board, and often features are developed to support ‘what happens if things go wrong’. Or to maximise applications with the apparent intent of enabling wider choice, which can lead to many issues in its own right.

  1. Scraping

Scraping is when one website takes content from another and relists it. This can happen as an affiliate/aggregation/commercial arrangement, or to drive traffic to the scraping website.

The idea is that this increases eyeballs on the content.

In the context of job adverts, you can see this everywhere, although things are changing. For example Indeed and LinkedIn both have relisted adverts from elsewhere.

It’s changing because now some job boards have secured volume of traffic, they want to monetise that traffic and keep control of the adverts.

An indication that this happens is when you click ‘apply now’ it takes you to another website other than the employer’s, such as jobrapido which (I believe) is an aggregator.

This can happen multiple times, and every time a job is scraped there can be parsing errors where data from fields are incorrectly transferred.

While if the original advert is then updated, it’s not necessarily the case for scraped adverts.

So scraped adverts can give inaccurate salary, locational, or even job information. They can also stay listed when the original has closed, without the employer ever knowing about it.

Leading to looking like a fake job.

  1. Relisting

As a feature for advertisers, many job boards allow an automatic relisting of adverts, once a week/month, to ‘bring it to the top of the pile’.

These relists can occur throughout the lifespan of an advert, such as in the example above - six weeks in an advert appears new, but a candidate is about to be offered.

Here, the vacancy may be live, but your application may not be considered, because it is so far in process.

This can also happen manually for many reasons.

I’ve taken down a job after a couple of weeks to rewrite it, based on fine tuning from an interview process. Or when a candidate has declined an offer put forward to them. Or when a vacancy has been put on hiatus.

The reason for a manual relisting might be unknowable if it isn’t stated in the advert, but it isn’t necessarily for bad reason.

If I were to relist an advert, it would only be because I need more candidates, in which case your application would be read.

But in many situations relisting can encourage an application that won’t ever be assessed.

  1. Laziness

Unfortunately it is the case that adverts may remain listed simply because someone forgot to take them down.

This is more likely to happen if there isn’t a cost per advert, such as on an employer website, or if there is an unlimited contract.

  1. Evergreen vacancies

Some vacancies are perpetually advertised to enable a candidate pipeline for a particular specialism.

There may be no vacancy now, but anticipation of vacancies in future, particularly within larger employers, or perhaps an recruitment agency that specialises in that field.

I would hope this is made clear in the advert, but that doesn’t always happen.

  1. Fishing

Sometimes those adverts aren’t evergreen, they’re simply there to harvest applications on the off chance that vacancy comes up.

I remember a Cambridge agency that used to scrape employer adverts, list them as their own, then submit those CVs speculatively to the same employers - without a commercial arrangement in place.

Make of that what you will - I think it’s despicable behaviour.

Is there any way to check for fishing? I’d probe the advertiser for specific information, and what their relationship is with the hiring process.

However, that’s not proof of bad behaviour, because of how the contingency model works. When multiple agencies work on one vacancy, it’s common not to provide company information until later in the process.

Conversely, if an agency is fishing only to build a bank of CVs, it’s unlikely they’ll admit to it.

  1. Scam jobs

It sickens me that advertising and job scams are on the rise.

If it doesn’t feel right, if they are asking for payment, if they do a bait and switch (this job isn’t right but here’s our CV writing service), if they ask for ID that can be used for other purposes:

Beware.

Here’s some information from Indeed on what to look out for.

Here’s an example of a scam I came across early this year.

  1. The disappearing act

This last category may or may not be a fake job.

Here’s the scenario - it looks like a vacancy, it sounds like one in discussion, perhaps you even interview there on site, perhaps you even do a 5 hour presentation at final interview on your 90 day strategy.

But then it disappears. Either permanently, or maybe reappearing but with no further comms from the employer/agency.

I hear this happening a lot, particularly at a senior level, in the UK market.

There are a few reasons it can happen, not all indicative of fakeness:

  • Company had budget to recruit; however changes in the business, or external factors, means the vacancy isn’t viable at least immediately

  • Company didn’t have budget to recruit and only establishes there is no budget later in process

  • Company runs an interview process to get free consultancy in the form of a final interview presentation (scumbags)

  • Company dipping toe in market to see what’s out there, with no intent to hire

  • Company benchmarking internal hire for future planning purposes

  • Agency establishes there may be a need for employer to hire and runs speculative process that doesn’t get approval

I’m sure there are many more reasons this can happen, and there isn’t a huge amount you do, given the appearance is that of a real vacancy.

You can ask if budget has been approved, do your research on the business on glassdoor or by speaking to alumni. But ultimately this kind of vacancy is a Schrodinger’s Cat - you won’t know if it’s live or not until the process is complete.

The purpose of this article is to highlight how this happens, but it’s also to set your expectations.

If you go into a fresh job search understanding this can and will happen, I hope it takes the sting away if you come across it. And enables you to get to the truth of which jobs are actually out there sooner.

This article may help you get better use of job boards , for the vacancies that count.

Thanks for reading.

Greg

How to doorknock

By Greg Wyatt • June 11, 2026
What follows is Chapter 43 from A Career Breakdown Kit. Is it a magic salve guaranteed for success? No of course not. But much like anything in a job search, nothing is guaranteed. What we do is identify which avenues can be effective for your context, and form an appropriate strategy. LinkedIn optimisation is great if people search for you on LinkedIn. Except speaking to my recruitment peers, fewer and fewer rely on it. Would it surprise you if I told you I rarely invested in at all before 2019? I've been working in recruitment since 1996 including at CEO level. Applications, networking, referrals, content, CV databases. All have a place and a purpose. Doorknocking on the other hand - some would tell you it has no place in the modern job search. If my daughter*, her friends and other 18 year olds can get a job from an old school technique, while those employers say "only through Indeed" then that might be a hint it still works. Some of whom are socially anxious, but then it's a replicable process, not a cult of personality. Or the periodic messages I get from CxOs who made their own jobs from direct outreach. Not forgetting Granovetter's seminal research and recent LinkedIn-specific studies in Science journal showing weak ties drive more job mobility than strong ties. And why wouldn't doorknocking work on LinkedIn, when you have a weak tie that suggests a viable employer? But no, it's not a guarantee. It's just an arrow in the quiver of a multichannel job search. 43 - How to doorknock Doorknocking is an old-school sales approach you may well have experienced, such as when a salesperson with a clipboard rings your doorbell and asks you to change electricity provider. My wife even once bought from exactly this scenario. While it’s not uncommon in a business-to-consumer situation it can also work business-to-business… if you can get past security. Although technology has moved on, the principle is the same whether in person, by phone, email, letter or LinkedIn: You approach someone cold and create your own opportunity. This isn’t an approach for everyone and requires chutzpah. If you are used to a high failure rate in applications - what do you have to lose by being proactive? More than that - look at all the advice on LinkedIn on how to improve your odds in a job search. It’s all transactional and applicable, available to everyone - if you all follow it, everyone takes the same step forward. While taking steps others are less prepared to do means the approach alone may stand out. If you encounter the equivalent of a sign which says, ‘Trespassers will be shot!’, pay attention. My own career of looking for work includes many non-transactional approaches: Walked into the local Cinema and asked for a job Walked into Office World and asked for a job Worked for Dad Talked to one of my ex-colleagues and gained some by-the-call phone research work Temped through an agency Walked into an Inn and asked for a job Referred to a publishing, training & consulting company In managing their small-scale recruitment alongside my day job I got to know the MD of a recruitment firm as a supplier. I went to work there Tapped up to return to a more senior role Started my business upon being given the boot - thanks Dave! It’s true I did apply through job boards and agencies. It’s mainly through my own means that I have secured my employment. *My daughter even tried doorknocking for her first job in our local town last summer. It didn’t work for her - she found a nice retail job through an application on Indeed. Her experience was positive enough that she helped a friend do the same - who got a job at the first shop they tried. Doorknocking is about approaching companies by category not because they are recruiting. These categories can be: All the employers in your local business park (often they have websites, with directories and job adverts) Companies listed in local newspapers, directories or platforms (local to me this could be Cambridge Evening News, Bury Free Press, Cambridge Network or Business Weekly) Top 100 employers in your domain Companies that have recently had funding and are about to scale Doorknocking companies you’ve come across through networking and its resulting market map Make contact and make a case for yourself on the principle of the right person, right time, right place, right message, right offer, and right price. There’s an element of luck involved for these elements to all come together. A disadvantage is that they may not be recruiting or ever have a need to employ you and even if they do have a vacancy, you still have to establish the right fit. That means a logically low hit rate. Your threshold for an acceptable failure rate will inform whether this is the right approach for you. The difference is the anonymous rejection of a volume-based application versus the ‘personal rejection’ from your direct outbound approach. Right person, right time, right place, right message, right offer, and right price. Let’s reorder and examine this marketing principle: Right Place Those Categories above. The place is the Company, and how you contact them. You can go in blind if you are a bold prospector or research them in advance. ‘site:’ is a useful command in Google. You can search on specific websites: ‘site: linkedin.com ACME jobs’ Right Person Typically this will be the ‘next one up’ - Head of department, Director, CxO or Owner. Who would be the budget holder at work? Those are prospects. Look them up on LinkedIn, PR, news, video platforms. What can you find out? Right Time While time can be happenstance, can timed factors create opportunity? What might be a hiring trigger? Perhaps you could contact a list of companies that have recently announced funding or a big win - news that may lead to hiring additional people. Or maybe you hear through the grapevine that Janine is about to go off on maternity leave. If their process isn’t time-bound, can you make it time-bound? ‘We aren’t hiring right now’ might mean they’ve run out of headcount in the January to June period and may have a new budget in July. What can you learn that helps you both? If you have radio silence, why not try again in a month or three months? Think about how you buy. If you don’t need something how likely are you to respond to a message no matter how well crafted? If you do need something you might think first of someone who keeps in regular touch. Right Offer You have more opportunity for career creativity in being unemployed than someone entrenched in a 9 to 5 permanent job. What problems can you fix for a company in a non-traditional employment capacity? Let’s say an employer has a problem that needs fixing. They don’t have capacity to do it right now. It isn’t burning enough to seek professional help and there isn’t sufficient work in view to make it a job. What if you caught them at the right time? An out-of-work TA Manager who offered to revamp an onboarding process. A web designer who notes lots of issues with their website. A strategic operational issue that is their unknown unknown identified by your expertise. A swamped team that could benefit from their admin burden being reduced. An orchard that needs pickers at harvest time. What starts out as a short-term, project, or part-time piece of work can become proof of concept. While rare, I know a few people whose permanent full-time jobs have come about this way, including at a senior level. Right message This is both specific and crude. It’s specific because nailing the message CAN create an opportunity a poorly written message may miss. It’s crude because sometimes you can catch people at the right time, no matter how cruddy your message is. This is the case in recruitment - I’ve picked up several senior appointments by calling at the right time. ‘I’m glad you called Greg, I’m starting to think about my maternity cover in June.’ Had I not called, that HR Director may well have gone to the specialist HR recruiters she is also in touch with. If you have a strong hook in your message - such as a key area of rare expertise or a clear issue you’ve identified which companies may have - go in with that. If you don’t - done is better than procrastinating: ‘Hi Greg, I live locally to Bircham Wyatt Recruitment. Love what you do. I wondered if you might be recruiting for an apple picker at any point. If you can’t help, could you point me in the right direction?’ Right price I’ve left this until the end because much of this is variable and subjective. What are your needs? What can they afford? What does the market say? How flexible can you be? Research will help if you can get a sense of what they generally pay through Indeed, Glassdoor or others. Or maybe what comparable companies that are advertising will pay. One approach might be to pro-rate your salary over the period you’ll work there. Doorknocking can sometimes give you access to jobs that are being actively recruited. It’s a happy byproduct of your work, if you find yourself in this situation. It’s worth persevering. Otherwise, it’s too easy to think after 10, 20, or 100 unsuccessful efforts that the approach itself is at fault. There is always an element of luck in any activity. This may be out of your comfort zone, in which case it’s an opportunity to grow. The only certain thing is that if you don’t try you definitely won’t benefit.

Root Canal - No problem, pt 2

By Greg Wyatt • June 4, 2026
Listening to the consequences of your recruitment process is an opportunity. I do find it interesting go through my older articles. How has my thinking changed? Has it improved? How was I so cringy? Looking at this article in its August 2023 form, I hadn't yet focused on Candidate Resentment as an opportunity to improve how we recruit. Not because it's decent to treat people better, but because that is a happy byproduct of strategically assessing our work as it supports our goals. Whether that's filling vacancies or finding people that meet our goals long-term and flourish doing so. Root canal If you recognise that speaking to the potential problems of the people you want to engage is a good idea, you may also recognise why you shouldn't create any problems that push them away. Engagement is an ongoing process that carries through every stage of recruitment, even into employment. Yes, bring your candidates forward, in part by showing how you solve their career problems. But, don’t throw up unnecessary issues that undo your good work. Listening to the consequences of your recruitment process is an opportunity. Why did that candidate proceed? Why did another withdraw? What raised concern? What about the potential candidates we don’t even know about? What influenced their decisions? I’ve spoken to tens of thousands of candidates, prospects, applicants, and everything else, during my career. Out of curiosity, I’m always interested in what influences their decisions in their pursuit of a new career. What fascinates me is that these are the Gemba , the unknown unknowns that we can extrapolate into our own recruitment processes. What problems do they encounter elsewhere, that discourage them from applying, that encourage them to withdraw, and why? And how might we be guilty of the same? While if we are guilty, how can we fix these problems, so that the objection never comes up? Imagine that - the reader that might have walked away, who instead chooses to engage. This may seem an unknowable unknown, but one of the benefits of my job seeker work is hearing about the issues they encounter on their side of recruitment and how that may influence their decisions. Considering these are people that are very problem aware, their appetite for bullshit is in some ways higher than the problem unaware (passive in old speak). While in others, what you may consider normal behaviour, they consider red flags. While we can’t control the behaviour of candidates, we can learn what influences their behaviour and form a process that nudges, draws forward or mitigates when needed. What are we accountable for that might present a problem for a candidate we want to employ? Especially when, in normal life, moving jobs is one of the biggest stresses? How might we unnecessarily cause scepticism or anxiety? Auditing your own recruitment process as a mystery candidate is one opportunity. As is surveying your staff for their experience - with the caveat they are happy to be working for you, skewing their perception. Or perhaps they're terrified of losing their jobs. Do they really want to rock the boat with criticism? But it’s the candidates who withdraw, who hesitate, who object that can be the source of the biggest improvements. What would you say their common complaints are? You can look to LinkedIn for the answer, in their high-engagement posts. Salary on the job description (they mean the advert) ATS data duplication Responsiveness and transparency Tardy, bloated and unnecessary recruitment stages A robotic process that forgot they are human Which becomes your choice. Do you look within and challenge yourself with 5 Whys to see how you can improve? Do you take away problems before they can occur? Saving your candidates unnecessary toothache? Or do you lay blame on the areas you can’t control? Those are the questions. Regards, Greg p.s. I’m available for interesting work - UK key hires, fractional talent acquisition and recruitment writing. Maybe we can talk. p.p.s. A Recruitment AiDE is out now - the discipline for UK key hire recruitment