Job advertisement is a scam, the recruiter is a scammer, and the position does not exist.

Some go for quantity. They mass-send the same CV or carefully modify each file, personalizing it for the position and company.

– I started looking for a job on January 1st. I am in the process of writing my master's thesis, still have student status below 26.

It’s the 265th day of this year, and I’ve been sending about 15 CVs daily on average. In total, that’s almost 4,000 – says Piotr in a viral TikTok video. – I’ve even reached the recruitment stage a few times, where I had to perform a task or a series of tasks. And I still don’t have a job. Even though I’ve almost doubled the pool of available offers on Rocket Jobs and Pracuj.pl, I’m still screwed.

Desperate, he printed paper business cards and started handing them out to random people on the street.

If all the CVs Piotr sent were printed out, they could be compiled into a huge volume of works by an unemployed twenty-something. Other young people would surely add their creative works in a similar vein, creating a saga authored by frustrated unemployed youth knocking on recruiters’ doors, windows, floors, ceilings, and walls. And the responses, just like before, are nonexistent and will never appear.

Ghost Recruitment

It’s safe to assume that job ads are written by the devil. Lost and naive souls send CVs, hoping to land in the heaven of employment. Meanwhile, the recruiter-devil wields a pitchfork through their head. And that’s in the best-case scenario, because getting a rejection is at least some interaction with the infernal forces of recruitment.  

Many of my friends complain about ghosting from recruiters, as if some listings are endlessly posted on portals just to attract ghosts. The existence of ghost jobs is confirmed by data from the Greenhouse recruitment company. According to their report, 18-22% of the offers published by Greenhouse could be classified as such, where the company has no intention of filling the position. Meanwhile, a 2024 study by MyPerfectResume shows that 81% of US recruiters (out of 753 surveyed) admitted that their workplace posts recruitment ads that are not real. When asked about the reasons for such actions, they said they are testing the market response, gathering intelligence on competitors, maintaining the company’s presence on job portals, and building a candidate database for the future.

It’s unclear what portion of Polish job offers are for ghost jobs, but I assume it’s not a marginal phenomenon. Social media platforms and discussion forums are teeming with posts like:

“I sent 1000 CVs and didn’t get a single interview.”

“No one responds to my CVs, what am I doing wrong?”

“Can someone analyze my CV?”

– I always tell my close ones who participate in recruitment processes: “Remember, it’s not about you, but about a broken system.” Of course, there are employers who conduct quality recruitment, but the scale of those who don’t is overwhelming – explains Maja Gojtowska, who since 2008 has been helping companies communicate better with candidates and employees. – It’s not easy. 75% of applications that reach employers are rejected at the first screening because they are off-topic. When I hear that a candidate sends 300 CVs in a month, I wonder about the quality of those applications.

So, do job seekers have to get used to being ghosted? – Of course, the feedback problem is growing and will continue to grow because recruiters receive a huge number of applications. When I helped a friend find a job in marketing, I contacted a company that posted a junior position just three days earlier. I asked if it was worth sending another CV. They said no, because they already received 600. And it’s common for a recruiter to handle 10, 15, or even 30 recruitment processes simultaneously. Add to that other responsibilities, and it’s no wonder recruiters can’t respond to every application – especially since they might not even know why a candidate was rejected; the decision is ultimately made by the manager. In training sessions, I hear recruiters’ frustration – they go to their bosses, ask why they rejected a candidate, and hear: “I don’t know, come up with something” – explains Gojtowska, and adds:

– I don’t want to defend ghosting, because of course there is the possibility of automating communication through ATS systems. And although most employers have ATS, I doubt they invest enough in planning the recruitment process well.

Recruiter ghosting remains a relatively positive scenario. The worst, most hellish, is “job scam”.

Fake job offers prey on candidates’ frustration

The level of frustration is directly proportional to housing prices, a clear lack of good intentions to inherit an apartment in a big city – this mix of ailments can dull even the most internet-born vigilance.

Twenty-something job seekers describe their work experiences:

– There was supposed to be a job in administration. After searching for reviews online, it turned out to be a scam. They take employees in groups to some villages and have them go door-to-door, encouraging people to install satellite dishes – says Maja.

Adam took a light job of building a fence. On site, it turned out that the “fence” was actually “digging trenches in mud”. The second time, he accepted an offer as a machine operator on a production line. When he arrived at work, he found out that his position was actually “hammering copper pipes while pushing them into a crusher”. He thought, “Third time’s the charm”. Everything seemed fine during the interview – polite, credible company, the same position he applied for. Adam asked where his contract was. The boss replied that he had to work for a week first, and then they’d see if there would be one.

– I’m generally looking for a job to earn some extra money, especially as a student. I received an SMS from one of the offers on OLX, where I sent my CV to join some webinar. And it turned out to be a scam. At first, it sounded like responding to people as a chatbot/customer support. But the meeting organizer later said that my job would involve opening bank accounts – complains Weronika.

According to the The LinkedIn Job Search Safety Pulse report from 2026, suspicion of fraud while browsing job offers has become a normal part of the experience – 72% of respondents admit they wonder about the authenticity of the offers they view. The report’s creators highlight the phenomenon called The Gen-Z Scam Gap – 32% of surveyed Gen-Zs declared they fell victim to a work-related scam, while the same percentage admit they deliberately ignore red flags in ads because the job market is still competitive.

The survey was conducted among citizens of the USA, Germany, India, the UK, and Brazil. The authors attribute the high risk of falling for work scams to, among other things, the uncertain situation on the job market, high pressure, and competition.

AI professionalizes scams on the job market

Work scams take various forms. As reported by “BBC”, one victim of a scammer-recruiter received an invitation to a recruitment process on LinkedIn from a convincingly looking man. The scammer conducted a video interview about the offer, then asked for a test, with instructions in a Google sheet. After completing the task, the woman went to sleep, and in the morning, she realized someone had cleared her account.

It turned out that the sheet contained malware, which allowed the scammer or their gang to steal 18,000 pounds.

In April, Polish police, in cooperation with banks, launched educational webinars warning against “recruiter scams”.

“An American agent contacted me. I received a great offer, 30,000 euros per month. I just had to write posts, sometimes upload a video. To start earning, I had to complete tasks, and access to them cost a thousand zlotys. When I wanted to resign, the contact was cut off” – recounts a victim warning citizens about scammers as part of the “Bankowcy dla CyberEdukacji” campaign.

There are many ways to scam job seekers. Many are far less obvious than the “American agent” trick. Money extortion scams have a long history, but the development of artificial intelligence greatly aids scammers, leading to the professionalization of scams. More and more job offers created by AI appear on job platforms – free of linguistic awkwardness and typos, credible and elaborate. The costs of generating fake offers are practically zero, and in a short time, more of them can be produced than real ones.

Scams are increasingly less limited to an email from a strange domain or an unremarkable WhatsApp message. Some fake listings require users to log into their Google account and are not much different from genuine recruitment ads. It takes a mix of intuition, time, and skill to verify each offer’s authenticity, especially when mass-sending CVs. It’s the end of the dominance of the classic scams involving Turkish princes’ emails, like Elizabeth II asking for BLIK from beyond the grave. Of course, there will also be retro scammers using old, proven methods, but AI has given rise to many new ones.

One of them is the chance to become a financial mule. This position is hidden under proud titles like “Payment Processing Manager”, “Money Transfer Agent”, “Remote Administrative Assistant”, “Quality Control Specialist”, or “Customer Service Person”. In reality, it’s a career path involving sharing your bank account and transferring illegal funds.

Another method is the scam “to buy work equipment”. Since some people, when facing the job market, expect absolutely nothing good, it happens that someone agrees to pay for equipment out of their own pocket. After all, as the scammer-recruiter assures, the equipment costs will be added to the first paycheck. In reality, the store is fake. When the victim, dreaming of a young, ambitious team, provides card details, scammers use it to pay for other goods.

The scam “creme de la creme” is the use of positive emotions after a successful interview. Scammers may ask to install fake apps like Indeed Interview or MyInterview, which are supposed to provide the future employee with information about their position.  

After installation, they learn one thing – that they are screwed again.

And they could be even more screwed, because of the Russian connection. In June 2026, journalists from “Vot Tak” analyzed an enticing offer from the “Wrocław Praca / Polska” chat: “work with a flexible schedule, no office and dress code”. Technically, the ad was not lying. To work in Russian sabotage, no office or proper attire is needed, and that’s what the offer was about. Just like at least hundreds of others, increasingly appearing in Polish groups. Recruiters are looking for people willing to set fire to NATO military vehicles, Ukrainian cars, or donation collection points. In Ukraine, but not only – recruitment is accelerating. And who knows, maybe it will turn out that the FSB is a much more reliable employer than Mr. Jan, who gets offended at a candidate who sent an AI-generated CV.

War of prompts. Candidates try to outsmart AI

The other side fights, as best as it can. The combination of frustrated ghosted candidates and AI development leads to CV-maxing. It involves placing hidden instructions for AI in the CV, designed to manipulate the recruitment system, filtering out non-conforming applications. 

Business Insider described an incident where a recruiter discovered that one candidate embedded a prompt of about 1500 characters in their CV. Using white text on a white background, they wrote instructions for AI to ignore the company’s guidelines for selecting the best CVs and to consider them a perfect candidate regardless of whether they meet the criteria or not.

In May this year, researchers from Duke University analyzed around 200,000 CVs. It turned out that 2,000 of them contained a hidden prompt aimed at “pushing out” the candidate’s application from the system. This phenomenon is called prompt injection (prompt injection). On social platforms, there are numerous discussions and tutorials on how to formulate prompts to fool the system.

This marks the beginning of a peculiar war of prompts, whose existence strongly supports the internet theory that we all died in 2020, and what we see now is hell. Recruiters, panicked that a student might outsmart their clever system, try to outwit candidates and show that they are better prompt engineers. Simone Lini, CEO of Zerolook, realizing that some CVs contain hidden instructions, decided to take up the challenge. He uploaded all CVs to a special tool and asked it to filter out those containing hidden prompts. And so in a loop – in the next round, most likely, candidates would prompt their CVs to avoid detection by additional tools, and then the smarter CEO would use a prompt to find even more hidden malicious prompts.

– Most employers in Poland select candidates using a “protein” method – convinces me Maja Gojtowska. – If a candidate is rejected, it means the recruiter made that decision or their CV got lost in a sea of others. After many applications, it’s clear they are often created by AI, so would it be reasonable to analyze such CVs with AI? Of course, there are tools for that. In Poland, there’s the Traffit system, which has an AI scoring feature. You can purchase the feature, which allows AI to evaluate CVs, but the final decision is still made by the recruiter. I often hear claims that AI recruits for humans. It’s easier to believe that artificial intelligence rejected me. But in Poland, it’s not like that. However, the time has come for employers to change the order of recruitment, because making decisions based solely on CVs no longer makes sense – says the expert.

4000 CVs and still no job: No one knows anything about anyone

AI has settled on both sides of the job search process – convincing candidates they can outsmart the recruitment system and aiding scammers in impersonating recruiters. As a result, it’s no longer clear whether the recruiter is real, whether the offer is genuine, whether the candidate is real, or even if the job title accurately reflects the work (if it exists at all).

– The job market is a paradoxical place, and frustration has been boiling in candidates for years. Today, it often finds an outlet – frustrated candidates post on LinkedIn, tag recruiters, and write: “Mr. Jan, you promised to get back to me on September 1st, and now it’s October 1st. Where’s the feedback?” – says Maja Gojtowska.  

And if you’re curious how Piotr’s story with four thousand CVs ended, I have a life update from him: after posting the reel, he received one offer, related to relocating to the south of the country.

– I didn’t have the courage because the expenses I would have to cover exceeded my means. Currently, I work as a freelancer. From commission to commission. Here a hairdresser, there a bakery. I’ve also worked at two game studios. I’m in the process of signing a longer-term contract with a local restaurant. Maybe next semester I’ll be teaching at a university, but only if I have enough hours. That’s all I remember doing wrong.

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