The Worst Advice From Career “Influencers”

Everyone turns to the loudest voice for sound advice. Unfortunately, the loudest voice is not always the right voice — and in the world of career advice, that gap can cost you a job offer, your reputation, or worse.

Social media has turned career coaching into a content game. Follower counts and viral hooks have replaced credentials and actual experience. Before you take advice from someone telling you how to land your next job, it's worth asking: have they ever hired anyone? Have they ever sat on the other side of the table?

I saw a post a while back addressing the rise of career tips on TikTok and LinkedIn. It started with a post by Daniel Space calling out Wonsulting for advising job seekers to post fake jobs and harvest applicant information to build their resumes. The advice was unethical, potentially illegal, and was being pushed to over 100,000 followers. It got me thinking — what else is out there that is just flat-out wrong?

Here are the top three pieces of advice I found that career influencers are pushing to their followers, why each one is dangerous, and what you should do instead.

1. Post a Fake Job to Harvest Applicant Information for Your Résumé

The idea: post a fake job listing, collect applications, and use other people's job descriptions and experience bullets to build your own résumé.

I don't even know where to begin. Taking someone else's work experience and passing it off as your own is unethical at best. But beyond the ethics, it may also be illegal. As Daniel Space and others in the comments pointed out, several states require employers to track and report applicant data from job postings. If you post a fake job and don't report to the state, you may be breaking the law. LinkedIn's own terms of service explicitly prohibit creating postings "without a reasonable and legitimate intent to hire for a bona fide job opportunity." A LinkedIn Recruiter license also runs about $170 a month — so beyond being wrong, it's expensive wrong.

And even if it works — how do you plan to perform in the interview for the job you built your résumé around?

2. Create Fake Work Experience and Use a Friend as a Reference

The idea: if you're making a career pivot and don't have the experience, make it up. Invent a company, give yourself a title, build a fake story of responsibilities and achievements, and have a friend pose as a former manager to corroborate it during background checks.

The example I saw involved someone targeting an HR Manager role. They fabricated a company, manufactured an entire employment history, and coached a friend to verify it. This might get you an interview. It will not get you the job — or if it does, it won't keep you there long. Employers do background checks, and professional verification services are more sophisticated than they were five years ago. Reference checks often go beyond the name you provide.

More practically: if you don't actually have the experience, the interview will expose that quickly. And if by some miracle you get hired, it's only a matter of time before your employer realizes the gap between what you claimed and what you can do. This reminds me of Christina Applegate in Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead — one of my favorites, but not a career strategy.

Gaps in your experience are workable. Fraud is not.

3. Keyword Pack Your Résumé in White Text

The idea: load the bottom of your résumé — or any white space — with keywords, then change the font color to white so they're invisible to the reader but readable by applicant tracking systems.

This is called keyword stuffing, and it has been a known tactic for years. The problem is that many ATS platforms are now specifically designed to detect it. Some flag and discard résumés that use it automatically. Others strip all formatting before passing the document to a recruiter — meaning your invisible keyword dump becomes visible, scattered throughout the text of your résumé, making it unreadable.

Beyond the technical issue, it fundamentally misunderstands how modern ATS works. Contextual keyword placement — meaning keywords that appear naturally within your actual experience — scores significantly better than keyword dumping. The better strategy is to write a targeted résumé that organically incorporates relevant language from the job posting throughout your actual content.

Other Things I Found Worth Mentioning

Beyond the big three, I also came across advice telling people to claim they signed an NDA to explain gaps in their employment history, change all their job titles to match their target role regardless of what they actually did, and generally fabricate or inflate their background to get past the screening stage.

I understand the job market is hard. Getting an interview is one of the biggest challenges job seekers face, and the pressure to do something — anything — is real. But unethical shortcuts don't just risk your candidacy. They put your professional reputation on the line in ways that can follow you for years.

How to Actually Stand Out

The answer to bad advice isn't more advice — it's better positioning. A well-written résumé that accurately reflects what you've accomplished, targeted to the role you're pursuing, will always outperform a keyword-stuffed fabrication. Recruiters read hundreds of résumés. They know what a real one looks like.

Before taking career advice from someone, check their credentials. Are they certified in what they're discussing? Do they have experience on the hiring side? Or did they get lucky landing one job at a name-brand company and turn it into a content career?

If you want help telling your actual career story in a way that gets you in front of the right people, that's what we do at area|Talent. No shortcuts. No fabrication. Just honest, strategic positioning that holds up when the interview starts.