Why Collecting Job Hunter Lists Are Useful to Recruiters
-
It isn't always immediately obvious why a fake job posting for the purpose of collecting responses would be beneficial to anyone and that can make it seem reasonable that fake job postings are more likely to be real than they are. But there is a huge benefit here that should be understood.
As a recruiter, you have to be ready to pitch a giant pool of candidates to a company wanting to hire. This is what you are paid to have. Companies like to think that their recruiters have a dedicated pool of screened, competent consultants at the ready that have worked with the same recruiter year after year. This is, of course, untrue and no one does this. The matching between recruiters and workers is almost universally ephemeral.
To be able to create this illusion and to have many resumes ready for companies at a moment's notice, it is highly valuable, to the point of being almost essential, that recruiting and staffing companies generate fake job postings in order to collect resumes. They have to do this with great regularity so that they can maintain a reasonable list of who is currently on the job market, who is willing to consider, who is desperately looking and so forth. This needs to be always fresh, within a few days. So the need to post new, fake jobs to get candidates to submit current, updated resumes and update the database as a fresh hit are essential.
This makes for a need to continuously generate a range of job postings that cover as many technical and experiential ranges as possible while constantly getting the pool to respond to them. It is a careful balance of many factors.
This data can also be used for intense market research to learn how to make people respond to postings more often, what price ranges people will respond to and so forth. It can also be used to manipulate the market to convince people that certain technologies are in demand or that salaries are decreasing or whatever or that "other" people are getting hired all of the time when they are not and so forth.
By then having loads of market research, a giant pool of recent resumes of desperate job seekers and ones that have now been told over and over again that the market is paying less than it really is, the recruiter is able to go with confidence to a hiring company and show a large list of people that they can reasonably get to show up for an interview with little notice. This allows the company to pretend that this is their pool of candidates rather than random people on the Internet that they will now need to reach out to and ask to interview for a new job that has not been discussed previously.
It's big money for recruiting firms. No magic or mystery needed.
