Man Wants to Hire a Fake Family to Increase Salary
Photo by: Pojoslaw/Getty Images
Family first. That’s what one Cleveland college student gearing up to job search believes – that a wife and baby are his first step to scoring a hefty starting salary. So he posted an ad on Craigslist offering $75 to any woman and child willing to pose as his fake family in photos to impress hiring managers!
For every “successful photo shoot,” he also offers an additional $100. “I will post approximately 12-24 photos of my “family” and my “life”, meshed together to create an entirely phony yet truly believable picture of myself,” writes the singleton, returning to finish his degree, he says, after a several year absence. “If everything goes as planned, whatever branch of whatever organization that looks into my background pending being hired for my first real job will be inevitably perusing my Facebook page and more and will come to the conclusion that I am deserving of a “Family Man” level of compensation.”
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The con, he declares, is “so crazy it just might work.” The truly bizarre part? His logic isn’t unfounded.
Photo courtesy of Craigslist
“Married men make a lot more money than single men,” reveals a blog on the Library of Economics and Liberty.“In the NLSY [National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey], married men make 44 percent extra, even after controlling for education, experience, IQ, race, and number of children.”
Economists refer to it as the “Male Marriage Premium” and they’re not exactly sure why it happens. Possibly, men with higher incomes are simply more likely to be married, or that marriage makes men more productive workers or that their marital status changes employers’ beliefs about their productivity.
Related: Being a Stay-at-Home Parent Is a Luxury … for Your Spouse
Regardless of why, data shows married men earn about 11 percent more per hour than men who have never been married – and divorced or separated men make about 9 percent more than never-wed men do.
“If the secret gets out that I live alone,” frets the Cleveland con artist, “have no children, and spend the majority of my disposable income on restoring vintage cars, I could find myself in a vastly different income bracket since it will be perceived that I can get by on less- MUCH less.”
But Kate Kennedy, a spokesperson for The Society for Human Resource Management calls bull.
She says any HR representative worth their salt wouldn’t consider marital status when considering a candidate. “Legally HR reps can’t even ask if a candidate is married,” she tells Yahoo Parenting. “There are protected classes in hiring,” she explains about Employment Discrimination law, which in many states extends to cover marital status. “Federal law defines what discrimination is in hiring and anyone who works in Human Resources knows not to ask about that.”
Whether or not Mr. Wannabe Family Man gets his girl, all those photos of a “fun, family friendly nature,” and his job, let it stand for the record that he was definitely right about one thing: “People are always a sucker for cute kids.”
