Fake Jobs - Jobseeker Basics XV

Greg Wyatt • February 3, 2026

What follows is Chapter 14 of A Career Breakdown Kit (2026).


I've updated it yesterday, having done a little digital hygiene and the revelation I have fallen foul of two fake jobs.


Or rather they are real jobs I'm recruiting for, which have been scraped without my permission, then hidden behind a signup screen.


Why not google "Engineering Manager Bircham Wyatt Recruitment" and see how it looks to job seekers?


What makes this particularly egregious is that in both cases AI appears to have been used to alter specific details of the role. Such as including a salary that is well, well above the budget for the role.


As well as being a waste of time for someone wanting to apply, there's the cost of their private details, and were the employer to see the advert, potential internal reputational risk of employees seeing a fantasy salary.


Looking at Trustpilot reviews, to gain access to one there is a paid subscription. The second appears to sell CV writing services to applicants. Both appear terrible from what customers say.


A real job that is worse than fake, if you happen to come across it.


I expect people are getting wise to these odd listings; however when one vacancy appears umpteen times in a google search, with only two leading to a real listing, it's easy to assume they are all fake.


"Be aware of fake jobs" is one of my top 10 pieces of advice shared in today's LinkedIn Live with Simon Ward. If you are around at 1pm GMT, please join us by clicking here.


14 - Fake jobs

 

Picture the scene.


You’ve 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.


You go through the obvious channels to see what jobs are out there - job boards and other websites which promote jobs.


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


If you happen to be reading this, new to a job search, indeed you might.


Many people in this market quickly realise that a significant number of adverts do not represent jobs that exist.


A double whammy in your emotional rollercoaster of recent weeks.


There are a few categories to go through, but the outcome is the same: an advert that, at best, wastes your time.


The recruiter perspective


When we advertise a job, we allow time for applications to come in before assessing them and starting the interview process.


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


There are no villains in this scenario. It’s common enough that risk is a factor when advertising.


If a recruitment process takes six weeks from advert to offer, 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, unexpected deadlines - all can delay a process.


There are many tools and suppliers which support a hiring process, one of which is the job board. Often features are developed to support ‘what happens if things go wrong.’


These same tools can lead to issues you may experience:


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. Indeed and LinkedIn have both relisted adverts from elsewhere at various times.


It's changing because some job boards have now secured high volumes of traffic and want to monetise that traffic while keeping control of the adverts.


An indication that this happens is when you click ‘apply now’ and it takes you to another website other than the employer’s.


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


If the original advert is updated, the scraped adverts won’t necessarily be updated.


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


This is a form of 'legitimate' scraping intended to benefit the employer through additional applications.


There is a second type of scraping.


As of 2nd February 2026, one of my vacancies has been scraped, without my permission, by apparently two different organisations.


In the first you can only apply by signing up. It lists a salary that I haven't disclosed elsewhere is not commensurate with role responsibilities.


If you click on my Company Name, it will tell you I am a large multinational recruiter, employing 51-100 staff.


Which is 51-100 more people than I employ, if you don't include me.


Let's ignore the AI word soup company profile they've lumped on me for now.


Some of my other adverts this website shares are slop summary overviews. Including the same job at 40% to 60% of the salary in the first advert.


It's the same for the second, except here the salary invented is well above the hypothetical top budget.


Looking deeper at both companies, on Trustpilot, both offer subscription services to access jobs that are hard to cancel. While one offers what appears to be bait and switch CV writing services.


Several reviews are from employers who have experienced similar to me, with instances of outdated vacancies that no longer exist.


What a sham.


Relisting


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


These relists can occur throughout the lifespan of an advert. Six weeks in, an advert may appear new, even though a candidate might be about to be given a job offer.


The vacancy is live, but your application may not be considered because the process is too far along.


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. It isn’t necessarily for a 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.


In many situations relisting can encourage an application that won’t be assessed.


Laziness


Adverts can remain listed 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.


Evergreen vacancies


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


There might be no vacancy now, with anticipation of vacancies in future. This is more common within larger employers or a specialist recruitment agency.


I spoke with a Talent Acquisition Manager recently about the positive side of an evergreen vacancy. She told me for that vacancy they are always recruiting, having mad eight hires in six months - it's a business as usual vacancy.


I would hope this is made clear in the advert.


Fishing


Sometimes adverts harvest applications on the off chance that a related 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.


Is there any way to check for fishing? Probe the advertiser for relevant information and what their relationship is with the hiring process.


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.


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


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 or access to a system beating framework), if they ask for ID that can be used for other purposes: beware.


These may be in public advert form.


They may also be from direct messages - LinkedIn DMs, WhatsApp messages, or phone calls. Often from ‘recruiters’ that appear to work for big corporates, yet have no connections and use a gmail account.


One scam last year cloned a legitimate company website and job seekers lost many thousands of pounds.


My scraped example above is, in my book, a likely scam too.


It’s worth reading through www.jobsaware.co.uk, which is a great resource on scams and employment exploitation.


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. You may even go so far as to do a 5 hour presentation at final interview on your 90 day strategy.


Then it disappears - either permanently, or it reappears with no further communication from the employer or agency.


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


There are a few reasons it can happen:


  • Company had budget to recruit; changes in the business, or external factors, mean the vacancy isn’t viable at least immediately
  • Company didn’t have budget to recruit and only realises there is no budget later in the process
  • Company runs an interview process to get free consultancy in the form of a final interview presentation (scumbags)
  • Company dipping a toe in the market to see what’s out there, with no intent to hire
  • Company benchmarking an internal hire for future planning purposes
  • Agency finds out there may be a need for an employer to hire and runs a 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 can do, given the appearance is of a real vacancy.


You can ask if budget has been approved, research the business on Glassdoor, or speak to alumni.


It’s unclear what proportion of job adverts are fake. It is a notable problem, and one which takes attention away from legitimate adverts that can put you closer to employment.


For the adverts that are real, Part Three of the book will help you assess which you are best suited for and how to effectively use job boards.



An inverted job search

By Greg Wyatt • October 7, 2026
I realise I've shared this chapter fairly recently, but there's good reason to revisit it. On Friday, I launched a new AI tool - Your Job Search Plan. You can find it here: https://your-jobsearch-plan.netlify.app/ It's based on the inversion principle below: the optimal job search is an inversion of how that job is optimally recruited. In other words, the first step in a job search should be to understand how recruiters and hiring processes seek to fill your ideal vacancy. Then to access all those channels while putting your best foot forward. It connects your applications, your networking, your CV, your LinkedIn profile, and so on, all of which should stem from your professional identity, the context of your career, the market conditions for that career, and therefore the work you'll need to do to boost your odds. One thing I'm pleased about with this tool is how it relates to the other tools and resources on www.bwrecruitment.co.uk/resources . So what seemed abstract, or painful activities without guaranteed outcome, become a practical arrow in the quiver of your search. I hope you find these tools helpful. They are a starting point, rather than a resolution. 20 - An inverted job search So, your broad approach to looking for a job is based on a product marketing strategy. How does this link to your job search and how companies hire? The next step is to recognise a job search is an inverted recruitment process. Whatever you can learn about the actual workings of recruitment, the better armed you are to navigate them. The first way in which this is true is around the routes to market employers take to fill a job. Employers want to fill vacancies in the most economical and efficient means possible. Sometimes they’ll rely on external advice, sometimes they’ll figure out their own way, and sometimes they’ll employ people to do it for them (such as a Talent Acquisition Manager or internal recruiter). When they rely on external advice, it may not surprise you it’s as varied and contradictory as job seeker advice. Take this nugget of wisdom: 80% of suitable candidates are not actively looking for work. By advertising, you’ll only have access to the 20% that applies to adverts. Hang on a minute! Doesn’t that sound an awful lot like the hidden jobs market? Of course, candidates aren’t hidden - much like hidden jobs, the priority is to understand the channels through which candidates are found. These channels directly mirror the channels through which you look for that job: Job boards; LinkedIn; Recruitment agencies; Confidential headhunting; Internal promotions; Secondments; Temp-to-perm hires; Consulting-to-perm hires; Referrals; Networking; Speculative approaches; Careers pages; Talent pools; Candidate databases Every job is different, dictated by principles like supply and demand, confidentiality, reputational risk, wherewithal, budget and capacity. The hiring process of a Software Developer is different from that of a Sales Director. If an employer only hires through an advert - this means if you don’t apply for adverts, there’s no way in which you can be considered for that vacancy. A second way it’s accurate is the notion that what’s true for one may not be true for others. This relates to candidate resentment . You may read online that some recruitment behaviours are signs of a bad employer. Yet, you should always follow the instructions given when applying for an advert or through an agency. They may instruct you to: 1/ Write a CV, cover letter and duplicate it on their ATS 2/ Tell them your salary when they don’t list theirs 3/ Do 17 interviews before reaching a decision 4/ Deliver a 6-month strategy plan by presentation 5/ Or any other request deemed unreasonable by Career Coaches, Job seekers, or people otherwise uninvolved in that process What some consider red flags, others will deem acceptable practice. It becomes your choice to play the game or not. Either follow their instructions or step away. You don’t have to apply if you don’t want to. In a similar vein, if you hear a hiring process has a preference, or if there are gaps in their employment armoury - these might be biases you can lean into. The hiring manager loves Arsenal Football Club and is biased towards people who love the same? Now might be the time to switch allegiance, if you can fake it or make it. They love a one page CV? Apply with a one page CV. You know the hiring manager of an advert with 400 applications? Give them a call - they might give you an unfair advantage. Poor practice from the employer, yet these are problems you can turn into opportunity. A third way in which this is true is by comparing inbound and outbound activity Outbound activity is where you go to your prospect (phone calls, messaging). Inbound activity is where the prospect comes to you (job adverts, content). Yet an outbound activity for a recruiter is an inbound activity for you (you receive phone calls and messages). While an inbound activity has you getting in touch because of their advert or content. When we talk about optimising your work, whether your CV, profile or interviews, it has to give the process what it needs. How can you be more discoverable, so you receive more relevant calls and messages? How can you improve your return on applications and your outbound messages? What about inverse non-recruitment? A brilliant, if strange question, with the same answer. When networking, going direct, seeking to become a referral, doorknocking, or other, what is the inverse of that activity? How does that person find or recommend people, if they become aware of a vacancy? How might they see you as a person to solve their problems, even if it isn’t a vacancy? You do these activities because of how they might help you and because of the benefit the other party experiences. What’s in it for them? If there isn’t anything in it for them, why should they help you? For each and every stage in recruitment, there is an opposed force, as candidates and the hiring process meet each other. It’s rarely an equal force, because every vacancy has supply and demand, resource, skill level, biases and intent at play. This is why each type of role has a different method of looking for work. Executive vacancies typically prioritise headhunted candidates, with fewer public adverts. Here the priority shifts towards building relationships with, and being discoverable by, Executive Search recruiters. If executives rely mainly on job boards, they may never think to focus on more suited channels. If you can learn what the other needs for that process to be successful, you can deliver the same. Speak to peers, speak to hiring managers you know, speak to recruiters, speak to former job seekers. How have they found work, and how would they recruit for your roles? Research your market to find viable employers, to identify recruiters and to build your network.  Then execute an appropriate strategy to access these channels.

Hierarchy of Pain

By Greg Wyatt • September 23, 2026
I had an aborted conversation at a networking event on Tuesday. It was about a problem vacancy a fractional people lead was looking at. Her client had instructed various executive search firms and none had produced a viable candidate. It seems the consistent approach was to match CVs to job description - pureplay transactional - and none were candidates that met the goal of the vacancy. You see that organisational pain that the vacancy heals wasn't defined by documentation, and therefore if you rely on that documentation to find candidates, it's happenstance that you come across someone viable. It's such a common problem, and when I 'fix' problem vacancies, it's invariably something that isn't described which was holding back a successful hire. The irony is this shouldn't be a hidden pain - presuming it's appropriate to share, it should be front and centre. What complicates modern recruitment is that, instead of better specifying vacancies, both sides of the hiring fence increasingly rely on LLMs to produce documentation that shaves the edges off. And as a result a candidate that has extensively healed the hidden pain a vacancy might even remove the evidence from their application in a bit to better match an advert or job description. The more transactional recruitment comes, particularly through reliance on technology, the worse this problem becomes. Probably not an issue for business as usual vacancy, but when a vacancy has impact, standard process of "5 CVs by Friday" will invariably hold you back. The chapter below is from A Career Breakdown Kit , my guide for navigating a skewiff employment market. It may be for job seekers, but the problem and solution are directly mirrored by the hiring side. It's taken word for word from the book, so some of the content is interconnected with other chapters. You can read most of them for free in the Jobseeker Basics newsletter. Hierarchy of pain This chapter reflects on how buyers make decisions, how this is reflected in hiring and why it matters in how you put forward your CV, application, interviews and other messages. If you’ve ever encountered sales in your career or life you are likely familiar with the concepts of Features and Benefits. The product is what is proposed. Features are what it does. Benefits are how it helps. However there are actually three other components in this hierarchy that make up commercial messaging. Value is what the benefits mean to you. “Sell the sizzle, not the sausage” - the sizzle isn’t a benefit, if you don’t like sausages. Outcomes are the tangible long-term results from using that product or service. “Sell the picture frame, not the screwdriver” - or rather what’s in the frame. Why does it matter? The idea being these peel back the layers of the onion to help a potential customer understand exactly What’s In It For Them. Yet, it may not matter whatsoever if your brilliantly put together message doesn’t achieve one element - show how you heal their hidden pain. In that frame example above, this might be a photo of a loved one, no longer with us. The photo is for our memories and feelings. The frame has to be right, to commemorate them properly. While it needs to be mounted well, using tools that make the job easier. Could you market that loss to sell a screwdriver? Hopefully not, though the message might be, “For memories that matter,” instead of "High Quality Screwdriver". It's a common pain many share, yet not one you might discuss down the DIY shop. Early in my career I had a lesson on hidden pain and its importance. I recruited an HR Manager for a high growth business whose requirement was for someone with broad experience in a similar environment. I presented an excellent candidate who was only available due to the shutdown of her employer - she had to stay to the final day to manage the process well, which limited her availability to start work. That was the only reason I explained her current situation to this new employer, because redundancy management wasn’t on the job description. She got the job! On day one of her new employment, her role was made redundant and she was offered a retention bonus to shut down the local site - everyone was to lose their jobs. The hidden pain here was redundancy, something not even mentioned to me during the vacancy briefing, and something I never broached with Julie. IIRC, there was no mention of it during the interview process either. Perhaps that’s an extreme example, but it does show what can happen behind the scenes. And if you happened to be out of work, a fixed term contract with a retention bonus might be quite appealing. Were you to apply to that vacancy, it would be important to highlight your redundancy experience - customising your CV might even have worked against you! So how does this hierarchy fit within your job search? You are the product, with your next employer on a buyer’s journey. Your features are what you offer. In a CV this is a combination of job titles, qualifications, skills and areas of experience. It’s also your salary requirement, where you are based and other elements like Visa status and working arrangements. Get these right and a little luck might mean they are all you need, considering that these same elements are what we source and filter on. I expect in this market you’re in competition with many people that offer the same Features, so the differentiator is what you bring to the table uniquely. The contexts of your career combined with how you helped, your impact, your achievements, and what the outcomes were. Related chapters: Principles of a Good CV Should I customise my CV? LinkedIn profiles that get found LinkedIn profiles that convert These are all resources that will help you communicate the benefits of your experience, the value you bring, the problems you solve, and the outcomes of these solutions. As for the hidden pain question, which in many vacancies isn’t articulated, how can you unpick hidden? Go back to why vacancies are recruited. How did they come about in the first place? They only fit into two piles - new and replacement. However these two piles have many subcategories relating to the problems they solve and the pain they heal. Researching the company can help. Inside knowledge definitely helps - it’s one reason good agency recruiters will be a valuable ally. But this knowledge isn’t always available, and sometimes the employer may not even know! I always come back to the principle, “You can’t be all things to all people.” And when you try to do this, you appeal to no one. It’s one reason why using LLM style AI to customise CVs is so problematic. The output is necessarily same-same because it’s a probabilistic determination of what you want based on an aggregate of data. It’s why, when recruiters receive a volume of AI augmented CVs, they all look the same. Your ‘good enough’ core CV ( Should I customise my CV ) leans into your strengths. While you might tweak it to meet the essential requirements, in the language of the employer, this should naturally support your greatest strength - the unique fingerprint that is your career. The downside of relying on customisation against vague, and often misrepresentative, adverts is that you can deemphasise and even remove your biggest achievements. The same achievements that would have helped you stand out. If your application doesn’t heal the hidden pain of a vacancy, it’s either because you have not defined your strengths correctly or you aren’t that close of a fit with the actual needs of the vacancy. An example to show this pitfall in practice. I caught up with a friend yesterday who has resigned from a post that was missold to him. His career is based on commercial acumen and enablement in a field that is heavily focused on risk management and compliance. So he’s already unusual in a good way (though his CV didn’t show this). On day one of his new job, he encountered a literal unexpected disaster. While these things happen, and he managed the situation effectively, this proved a consequence of the business culture and strategy. These problems kept coming up and his functional area in the business needed a complete overhaul at executive level. Rather than the commercial enablement picture they painted, they needed someone who relished chaos - a master of disaster. Completely the opposite of the career Simon wants. This isn’t something they could publicise in their recruitment process, for reputational reasons, yet it was a fundamental baked-in aspect of the role. I’ve no doubt Simon’s CV is a match for their job description. Yet he is not a match for their job. What if they’d seen CVs of people who’d leant into strengths of healing dysfunction? What if he’d leant into his strength of enablement? He may not have left his previous job for something he went on to regret. If you’re sceptical about how crucial hidden pain is in recruitment, think about your own hidden pain when applying for jobs. What’s going on in your life that impacts which roles are ideal for you. The same points you might not divulge when you’re just trying to get back into employment. Perhaps you've even experienced the pain I did when considering a hardware purchase. How did that pain inform your buying decisions? It’s no different for employers when they consider the pain and problems inherent in their vacancy.