I've been involved with fake interviews. (Hence throwaway account.) The context where fake interviews are required is when your firm has hired someone who is on H1B visa but is seeking a green card. To support the green card application it is required to show that the position cannot be filled by an American who is similarly qualified and will accept a similar salary as the immigrant.
In my case the context was my firm had done a true search for filling the position, where the H1B holder was found as the best available applicant. But then we had to do another fake job search for that already-filled position for the purposes of getting our employee a green card.
The hallmarks of a fake job posting, from that experience: (1) there will be only basic advertising of the role, with a strict "no recruiters" rule (2) there will be only one round of phone interview, focusing on a checklist of specific knowledge and experience points and acceptable salary levels
I get what you're saying, but the "fake job search" never yields any qualified hits, I haven't had to "fake reject" anyone so far. I'm being totally honest with you.
I'm sure I could wait a year and finally find an American born candidate who will pass the interview, but that would mean my projects and timelines are hosed.
We've tried to go the intern route and hire American undergrads as interns and then convert them to full time by offering them, the conversion rate isn't as good as you think, and they have a LOT of options in the valley.
Let me assure you, the biggest problem faced by any company, startup or otherwise is talent, it's extremely hard to find good talent, We could tweak our tech-stacks to be most open to a wide range of people and bring the bar down. But the bottleneck is still talent.
The goal of the fake job search is to avoid qualified hits, not to get them. If, in the fake search, we had found an American candidate with similar qualifications who would accept a similar salary it would have been worse than useless. Honestly reporting that would have sunk our employee's green card application, and we had no ability to hire a new person at all. The problem in a real search is finding talent; the problem in a fake search is avoiding accidentally finding talent while trying to "demonstrate" its absence to satisfy government regulations.
That must have been super unlucky then. I don't think the likelihood of that happening is very high though. If there were so many candidates who get snagged in the "fake job search", we'd not have to do the "real search" for so long anyway.
In my case the context was my firm had done a true search for filling the position, where the H1B holder was found as the best available applicant. But then we had to do another fake job search for that already-filled position for the purposes of getting our employee a green card.
The hallmarks of a fake job posting, from that experience: (1) there will be only basic advertising of the role, with a strict "no recruiters" rule (2) there will be only one round of phone interview, focusing on a checklist of specific knowledge and experience points and acceptable salary levels