It has been a subject for theorization for 2 years now. Theories suggest:
  • HHRR have been practising fake-job-posting as a means of keeping a personal database.
  • Some companies, specially large ones, do it too because their reach is so large that they can get databases big enough to be valuable and/or used to make other analyses.
  • Ghost companies/employer do it because their business is about getting and selling those databases.
Now, actual jobs do exist, and demand for employment remains high. Yet it seems that freelancing platforms are so good at providing liquidity of data that they ended up being more profitable for data scrapping than actual job matching, relegating actual job offers back to traditional networking. And even there, within trusted networks, fake job posts are pervasive too.