Survey of Fake Jobs SAMIT Video
-
I'm Scott Alan Miller and today on SAMIT I'm gonna talk about one of those dirty secrets of the IT industry. It's actually kind of not so much a dirty secret of IT as much as it's a dirty secret of everyone who's hiring IT. That secret is that most job listings, most job postings that you see out there are fake. That's right, and I estimate it's somewhere around 85%, but of course there's no way to really know; especially because any given job's ability to be fake is somewhat subjective. But let's talk about why this is the case.
So at a high level one of the things you have to realize is that the entire job market online where we have job postings and
job candidates that we need to match up, is a lot like an online dating service and like an online dating service both sides benefit from having really large numbers. People who are on the hiring side want to see loads and loads of candidates and makes them feel good about the service that they're using
that they're getting a large number of
resumes or calls or submissions on the
other side candidates want to see a
large number of job listings they feel
like they're getting great value because
they have lots of different jobs to
which they can apply and that feels like
they have their best chances because
there's so many opportunities so both
sides want to see big numbers even if
they only want to hire one person or get
one job that's an emotional reaction it
doesn't actually make sense both sides
simply want the right connection the
company wants to hire one good person or
a few and that's all they care about
whether there's a thousand people
waiting behind them or two doesn't
matter to them not in the end of the day
but it's just not important
the same for job candidates you want one
job not a thousand it just has to be the
right job and it has to hire you at the
rate that you're happy with but as long
as you get that one no matter how many
others there are isn't beneficial to you
and the more there are it's actually
harder to wade through so it's actually
a negative because it makes the process
of locating and
binding the the right resources that
much harder so both sides have a really
strong incentive to provide something to
the other side that's not exactly honest
jobs have a lot of reasons to want to
attract people so they want to make jobs
look really attractive or interesting
and candidates want to lie about their
skills and make themselves sound really
useful and interesting everybody has
something to play enlisting themselves
online exactly like a dating site so in
dating
we know that sites like tinder for
example are famous for being more than
99 percent fake it's either completely
fake which is the category where the
services themselves create fake profiles
to make the service look like it's busy
or other companies use the service with
fake profiles such as bots because they
want to collect information or do market
research or just whatever whatever logic
they have for doing that if you're
dealing with on the people side if
there's a real person but giving fake
information because they want to
encourage a connection where one doesn't
make sense we call that catfishing in AI
T or in jobs in general that IT is
specifically bad about this because of
the way the online hiring tends to
happen with the exact same thing the
services whether they're recruiting
firms or just websites that host job
listings have a massive incentive to
fill their sites with fake jobs because
as long as fake jobs are on there or any
jobs then candidates are going to fill
in profiles and start submitting which
allows people to collect information you
don't need a single real job for those
sites to make money a lot of it so you
have fake profiles and you have systems
that are creating BOTS profiles or
completely fake profiles but they're not
from the the website itself to collect
information but then you have lots and
lots of companies out there that falsely
represent themselves because they're
catfishing in a professional sense they
want to collect information about
possible candidates or they want to get
candidates on the line and hopefully
talk them into being hired for something
that isn't what they signed up for this
is pretty common
now that's just what's going on from the
company and the the website side there
are lots of recruiting firms that are a
little bit different than either and
they have a huge incentive incentive to
do the same thing as the website but
they often use job websites to
coordinate this which expands the
process even more they want to have lots
and lots of candidates on the line so
that when they go to a company to
propose that they can fill a job that'll
be easier for them to fill and the more
candidates they have the more desperate
those candidates will tend to feel which
makes them more likely to accept a lower
pay which makes the recruiter more
capable to fill a job at a given company
because if they come in cheaper than
some other recruiter they are more
likely to fill the position even if
their candidates are the same or lesser
so in the real world there's a massive
market force from every angle to fill
job sites with fake information in every
direction and it's real if you spend a
lot of time job hunting you will find
pretty quickly that job listings are
fake they may look real they may sound
real they may be posted to many places
they may be posted directly by the
company that you think is doing the
hiring but they're almost always fake
and 85% is pretty conservative it's
easily closer to 90 to 99 percent it's
just really hard to know for sure
because when you apply for a job and
don't get a response is that because it
was already filled is it old data was it
never meant to be filled did they mean
to fill it but change their mind there's
a lot of different factors that could be
leading to that and some of them are
overtly fake and some are just
suggestively fake and some kind of
overlap with being fake while not
actually being technically fake they
just result in utility of the same as
being fake so it's important to
understand when you're looking at job
listings because a lot of IT people use
job listings as a guide for things and
you'll hear people say this all the time
oh you want to know what people are
hiring for in your market go look at a
job posting and see what people are
asking for this is actually pretty bad
advice because it's based around the
fact that people think the job listings
must be real so that leads them to then
look for skills to acquire skills that
fake jobs are looking for
but those fake jobs are probably looking
for skills that people have put falsely
on their resumes for the same reason in
the other direction so feeding off of
each other and it doesn't in any way
reflect what people are actually looking
to hire at least in most cases and then
some places are simply looking to do
market research for example you're an
employer and you want to know how much
it might cost you to hire someone so
that you can then go to management and
talk about what it will cost to hire
someone to do that one of the easiest
and cheapest ways is to go onto a job
site post a fake job that looks
something like something you might hire
and see what kind of price ranges and
skill sets a number of candidates come
back of course a lot of those candidates
are fake the same way the job postings
are but it still gives you a number to
take the management and say look we
could hire someone for X so we would
like to then put a real job posting and
see about hiring them that's so common
that it's almost a stock way to do it
because of this we have a lot of
misinformation in the field whether it's
misinformation about how hard it is to
get a job because this makes people feel
like they can submit to 100 jobs and
only one answers them they feel like
failures and they're more likely to
accept less money or jump on an
available position and it makes
companies have a very hard time figuring
out which candidates are real so it's
the entire system becomes very very
misleading because of this so as an IT
pro as an IT practitioner what you need
to understand and you need to
internalize this because it's incredibly
important is that when you see a job
listing it doesn't matter whether you
see one of them or a hundred of them it
doesn't give you solid information about
what the market is like about what that
company is actually looking for or if
that job is even real and this creates
problems like people seeing requirements
and believing falsely that requirements
are very very strict but in reality
companies put in really weird
requirements into these fake job
postings so that they always have an
excuse to turn down anyone who comes up
it doesn't matter whether it's the
company doing it or a recruiter or
whatever and this is where you see
conflicting requirements all the time
now of course there are some
legitimately clueless people who put
accidental conflicting requirements into
job listings just because they don't
know how to hire and they're incompetent
it does happen but much more likely and
much more logical is that conflicting
requirements exist or illogical
requirements
exist so that no candidate will
reasonably fit the requirements list and
by doing this in most countries there
are legal stipulations around who you
can advertise a job to and why you can
turn them down and if those people feel
that they're being turned down for
illegal reasons such as race sex age and
so forth they may sue you because they
feel that they can win and in many cases
they could but if you have job
requirements that they didn't meet such
as simply demanding an illogical level
of formal education or a mix of
certificate certifications that you
would be unlikely to have or a single
piece of technical expertise that would
take you out of the price range of some
other job that you're looking for they
can turn you down based on those factors
and make it effectively impossible for
you to take them to court even though
they're actually discriminating and
would have hired someone have they
actually been looking without meeting
those requirements and it makes IT pros
feel that requirements exist that simply
don't so that's kind of the basics and
we're gonna build a lot on that but it's
important to understand at a fundamental
level that job postings are fake and
there's very logical reasons why it's
like that it's unfortunate but you must
accept it or you're going to find job
hunting and IT to be incredibly
stressful misleading and difficult when
okay it's going to be all those things
but it doesn't have to be nearly as bad
as it seems once we realize what's going
on and we change our behavior to work
around the way that that is happening
thanks for joining me today here on this
MIT channel remember to Like and
subscribe and you can hop on to patreon
and sponsor us directly through there
and follow us along here to help with
your career growth as we discuss more
career topics on how these kind of
factors play out in the real world -
How is the subtitles/cc done for YT videos? It is very accurate here.
Anyway to get it to transcribe these to a document whose text you could put underneath your videos? -
@momurda said in Survey of Fake Jobs SAMIT Video:
How is the subtitles/cc done for YT videos? It is very accurate here.
YouTube does it, it is completely automatic.
-
@momurda said in Survey of Fake Jobs SAMIT Video:
Anyway to get it to transcribe these to a document whose text you could put underneath your videos?
Gotta find an easy way to pretty it up. But I know how to get it now, so I can work on that.
