Dummy jobs?!

I am an outsider to this industry…while I own an agency…I am in the end a technologist. And I am really interested in helping create and forge a new identity for agency recruitment.

One thing that plagues my industry is the use of dummy or fake jobs. What is that? Well, it’s a job that a recruiting company places to have people apply for the sake of applying. There isn’t a real client behind the job. So the candidate is applying to a dummy job. I know — why do that?

Well, there are a host of reasons why you would see a recruiting agency do that. They could be starting to build for anticipated roles that are about to close. That is a fair reason to start building a pipeline. But for the most part, they are trying to collect resumes and phone numbers. Also by getting these resumes, they can call on people and dig into their background. What’s to gain here — well if the candidate is actively interviewing the recruiter wants to know where they are interviewing and names of those managers involved in the interviewing process — the hopes of getting a lead on a hiring manager to try to sell services to. Or they will ask about the current company they work for — hoping to again land a manager name to be able to cold call.

What do we do at Elevano…I dislike dummy jobs. I mean who wants to get their hopes up in applying for a fake job. If we post a job it’s because we have a role. We want to attract candidates with the quality of our copy. And the whole let’s drill down on people to get hiring manager names is very old school. Between LinkedIn and public job postings, we all know openings. Manager names and details are out there. Sure we might miss out on some stuff not posted anywhere, but on the flip side, our candidates love us for our transparency.

What can candidates do — it’s hard. I feel for ya! How can you differentiate a company with these dummy jobs vs a company working on a valid/live opening? I’d say look at some of the reviews out there for the company? Try to find some social proof. Not all agencies are created equal.