Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

If I wanted to game my stock price and mislead my competition, a bunch of highly specific (and fraudulent) job postings on my website (in combination with other investor-adjacent reporting) would be a great low cost start.

yes, and that's what is done.

How, exactly, would that convince an investor such as myself that your company is suddenly worth more?

Generally when I'm looking at a company's financials more employees means less profitable.

If i post a bunch of ghost/fake jobs, then investros *could potentially* see that as a signal that i am growing, and they should invest NOW before its too late...as one example. Another example, could be that my competition sees "enough/so many open jobs", that they might assume their market position is less than it might be - think of it as a sort of distant intimidation...but also, could be an approach for that competition to get distracted and spin their wheels trying to hire unnecessarily (to try to block up the pool of relevant candidates), thus burning budget in process, etc.

It's common in the investment industry to look at the content/trends in a company's job posts. More job posts are not directly a good thing, but job posts can give insights into the departments or projects that are growing

For example: https://www.linkup.com

You need to think outside the box. Once you've determined that a particular technological avenue is a dead end, gin up a bunch of job postings that would suggest that you're doubling down on it and watch your competitors set money on fire trying to catch up.

(There's a classic story from the Windows 3.x era regarding pen computing, where Microsoft spent money on it and advertised that solely to force competitors to expend efforts where Microsoft knew there was no payoff)

For sure, you're right that there are vastly more creative and devious ways to leverage jobs against one's competition. :-)

That would be a mistake, because "securities fraud" is one of the few ways you can get smacked for lying to the public. Lying to the public about climate change? Meh, it's hard to prove damages from the lie so you'll probably get away with it. However if you lie to shareholders about global warming, and that factors into your outlook of the company, you'll get smacked with securities fraud suits.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...

Which is funny because startups don't get any consequences for misleading investors/customers with fake job postings and the behavior in that industry is rampant.

startups aren't public companies.

But are still capable of defrauding investors.

Since when are financials in line with stock price these days?