Not only does this disincentivize HR from running fake vacancies or stringing multiple candidates on just to keep their options open, but it also solves the problem of unemployed people job-searching effectively working full-time for free. The fact that companies would have to pay to hire workers would mean they try to make the selection as short and effective as possible.
They mean they are lying to the applicant’s face, gaslighting them.
What they did was the equivalent of contracting out a coder to engineer some software for them, without paying them for it.
The job market itself is a fraud, a scam.
Saying ‘its not what we expected’ is simply what they are legally required to do in order to be able to frame the entire thing such that they can’t be sued for getting useful labor while giving no compensation.
Its a framing device, frame it as a job interview. Its ‘oh your test performance was not satisfactory’, written on some kind of document somewhere. The actual point is to get free software engineering services.
Its a scam.
Think about if you tried to do this with physical, mechanical engineering or architecture: here, draw up some plans for this device or this part of a building… oh, we’re sorry, that’s not satisfactory… but anything you submitted during the job interview, thats the intellectual property of the company now.
You can also scam the job market itself by simply coordinating with a market research firm, have a set of companies issue an array of ‘job openings’ that are not real job openings, what they actually are is a way to do a survey of the job market itself.
Its all a complete fucking joke at this point.
Also, a metric companies report on, and then those reports get amalgamated into broad economic data… is just literally ‘how many job openings did we post’.
So, if you wanna look like you are a growing company, for extremely little cost… just post fake job openings, that you’ll never hire for.
Have 1/3 or so of all job openings by all companies look like this, idiot ‘economists’ who can’t figure out what is actually going on, look at the aggregate numbers and conclude the economy is growing 1/3 faster than it is.
And there’s also the classic ‘we want to do an internal promotion, but for legal reasons we need to pretend its a competetive search through the whole job market, so here’s a bunch of fake job openings where everyone other than our internal person will be unsatisfactory’.
Recruiters and HR know all this shit, they do it regularly, and they’re usually not very keen to tell you about it.
They’re all scum, as low and contemptible as a scammy car loan/lease salesman, or a ‘date the rate marry the home’ used house salesman.