Phantom Jobs

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Do any of you come across jobs that can't possible be real in agency adverts or job centres (if in uk directgov)?

I have come across a few. One asked for a software developer but didn't specify the technical skill set required (which is unheard of in the IT industry), they usually specify in detail the languages and software they need you to have skills in, but this job said "must be flexible."

It was obviously a fake job.

Another one I came across I phoned up several times on the number given and it was dead line. I asked the woman in the job centre to call it for me and after much reluctance she did and handed the phone to me. It said: "this number is no longer in service." So the job advert gave a phone number that wasn't in service!

I also think agencies do it too just to get you to send in your cv.

That is very true. I've had experience of enquiring about specific jobs in the past with agencies only for them to say that position was now closed and would I like to register with them...

Looking at job listings is sort of like free entertainment. They're so ridiculously unrealistic that it's funny to read them these days.

What I typically see is a job which asks for deep career experience in multiple fields. To get the required experience in one of these fields would take getting a graduate degree and working as a professional for decades, and the job asks for two or three. I think one job listing I saw wanted a physicist (or a similar hard science field) who was also a senior software developer. I also see job listings where the job asks for someone with two mutually exclusive concentrations - for example, a Linux Oracle J2EE developer who also knows Microsoft SQL Server, EF, and so on. Or a Microsoft developer who also knows Linux and Perl. I've also seen a lot of 3-month contract jobs recently, which is silly - no developer could be productive with a code base in 3 months, and sure couldn't build anything worthwhile from scratch.

Resume trolling is a perennial thing that has been going on as long as I can remember, particularly consultants. They can just say the job was filled or something and put you on their list. Another theory is that these unrealistic jobs are created for the purpose of saying no one can fill the job, so the company can do ... other things.

I think also that during bad economic times a lot of "jobs" are invented so that it can be said the economy is not as bad as they think it is. In the UK they are always going on about skill shortage but I think its because the jobs they cannot fill are unrealistic.