One of the most diabolical trends I’ve heard about in the job market is that about a third of job postings are “ghost jobs” — where there is no intent of hiring someone for the position posted.
A survey of 1,641 hiring managers had 40% of respondents admitted to posting ghost job listings with the reasons shown in the image.
This trend feels unnecessarily cruel and disheartening for job seekers navigating the market.
@carnage4life I applied for a job that on paper is tailor made for my quite niche skillset.
My application was made 26th November. It's been "in review" for at least a week, but I only know that because I log in to a 3rd-party site to check on the status every couple of days.
@carnage4life I can confirm from a German company that this is actually common practice.
And it's disgusting.
@artemis @elrohir @carnage4life
Ah, that's a shame. That enables the "ghost jobs" and similar shenanigans.
I imagine this has been happening a lot longer than we realize.
Anecdotal/circumstantial evidence: I first encountered widespread use of the term "resume black hole" over two decades ago.
@gsuberland @nf3xn @carnage4life So I'll ask you the same question: where do I go to find a job? I'm happy to abandon LinkedIn, which is indeed horrible. But I need a job, asap. How do I find one?
I also use other search sites, but so far LI has the most comprehensive database. I also go to the Careers sites of all the potential employers I can think of. I also tried using search engines to search for job listings, but search is so enshittified that I couldn't get it to work.
@sennoma @nf3xn @carnage4life I got made redundant a few weeks ago and am in exactly the same situation.
I'm doing basically the same things you mentioned but with the addition of using personal networking (over 10 years in the field means I know quite a lot of people) and posting on here.
it's only been a couple weeks and it's December, the literal worst time to try to find a job, but I've had some good leads and four concrete offers for contracting work to tide me over.
@gsuberland It's a horrible place, I quite agree. I never look at the front page/feed, which is the stuff of nightmares. I stick to the jobsearch page.
@gsuberland @nf3xn @carnage4life Sorry to hear we're in the same boat!
I've been in my field for close to 15 years, but so far all my networking has got me is one interview.
Within retail we have always had what they called evergreen job postings for cashiers and receiving. Even if the store was at its maximum staffing corporate kept the postings up. If an excellent candidate interviewed we would accept them and go over staffing - - each retailer is different and some wouldn't allow this.
Turnover can be high. Seasonal help, holding people accountable for showing up & performance, college kids, etc.
@carnage4life I remember at the beginning of my career applying to a position and being invited for an interview. I ended up taking a different job and cancelling the interview.
Two years later, when I was job hunting again, I applied to the same job posting. It was the same application, just with two years of relevant experience. They didn’t invite me to an interview this time. (The position wasn’t explicitly for fresh graduates.)
Friends who worked at that place had told me, how much they needed people with my profile to help with shortages… It had clearly become a ghost job to placate employees.
@carnage4life
So, in order,
Investment fraud
Investment fraud
Employee abuse
Employee abuse
Kinda halfass almost but not quite doing their job as hiring managers, but not actually in a useful way.
Sounds about right?
This has been going on for decades. Especially in government contracting where hiring has to appear to be competitive but you want a specific person. So you craft a listing with that person specifically in mind.
@carnage4life "to make employees believe their workload would be alleviated by new workers"
Ugh, at least my company doesn't have time to pull this one
@carnage4life Once Upon A Tim I went for an interview for a contract job. They asked me how I would undertake the task they had, and I told them, and that was the end of that - no job materialized. So I deduced that the interview process was simply an scam to obtain free consultancy from applicants.
A couple of years later I got a request from an agency to attend another interview with the same customer. So I told them what happened last time, and said that my terms for attending the interview would be £500 paid up front, refundable against my first invoice when I'd started the contract job.
Not surprisingly the customer changed their minds about wanting to interview me.
This was a branch of Xerox.
Back when photomanipulation was a seriously dark art graphic designers would get us (photographic studio) to do manipulations as "proof of concepts" then say "we have people in house who will do the work, sorry" and then run the proof of concept and claim they did it themselves. I started having to leave "tells" in all my work to stop it happening and the local graphic designers complained.
@carnage4life I fell for this, a lot, and it wasted a lot of my time and money. I really started to doubt myself and grew sort of paranoid.
Then I discovered that serious jobs were still being posted to Craigslist. The national job boards was where most of the "ghost" fishing for candidates was taking place.
So I can really strongly recommend Craigslist, which got me 3 serious offers in a week and finally ended my traumatic job search.
@Urban_Hermit @carnage4life good tip and likely because Craigslist charges to post jobs. So even though it isn’t a huge amount it almost certainly reduces the incentives to post ghost jobs (as it becomes a real expense for the company and likely more meaningfully something the person posting has to justify/expense/request a budget for etc.
Which for real jobs is probably trivially easy to justify.
But makes the ghost job posts have an actual paper trail and budget
@carnage4life And I don't think that this is new.
At least with the "act like company is growing" goal.
@carnage4life Several years ago, the Monday after a big layoff where all remote employees had been let go (including me) I saw the company had posted a job opening describing my *exact* former position and skills.
I contacted HR to ask if I could apply, but was told they do that just to make it appear as if the company is still growing and healthy.
Weeks later the company was sold, and no longer exists. It was done for appearances.
@carnage4life don't forget the silly PERM process needed for employer-sponsored permanent residence status in the US. The company has to prove, for employees they already had to secure work visas for, that no local is available to take the job. I would not be surprised if PERM recruitment "failure" (read: the company actually found someone, which they didn't want) result in the no offer in some cases
Recruitment and employment law is so broken
Phishing exploits
@carnage4life The BBC has this article:
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240315-ghost-jobs-digital-job-boards
It quotes a survey thankfully from outside the resume building industry: https://clarifycapital.com/job-seekers-beware-of-ghost-jobs-survey
@carnage4life wow, giving people false hope they’ll stop being overworked…
I was always mad when I showed my team of three putting in enough overtime to justify at least two more hires and they said no chance of that. I don’t know which is worse.
One aspect of ghost jobs only briefly touched on in the article, is something that I think may make up the majority of ghost jobs: the latency between a position being posted, and a position being taken down.
There is a very long wait list to join my team, both internally and externally. When I post a job opening, it gets a lot of applicants very quickly. Everyone that applies, gets screened and possibly interviewed.
Still open, but applying on day 10 is probably too late
1/N
If you apply on day 10, there are possibly hundreds of people scheduled for various levels of screening ahead of you. The role will likely be filled before you can be screened.
Technically not a "ghost job" but from the candidate's perspective, it can feel almost the same.
I make sure that my managers take listings down ASAP once we have a pool of at least one candidate that has passed the interview. I do "pre-hire" announcements to help potential candidates be ready day 1.
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