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Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

• kappi 2y ago
  In tech, ghost job listings maybe as high as 50%. Another reason for ghost job listing is to meet the requirements for visa processing.
  • htrp 2y ago
    > Another reason for ghost job listing is to meet the requirements for visa processing. This plus the idea of just grabbing and holding resumes that the HR team will never actually look at.
    • evantbyrne 2y ago
      I suspect a lot of the frustration people describe comes from this combined with presently high demand for remote tech jobs. Back when I was job searching in late 2023, I noticed there would be _hundreds_ of applicants for even the worst postings (e.g., paying 50% market rate). Nobody is reading that many resumes, and in the unlikely case they are, that person probably lacks the expertise needed to evaluate candidates. Screeners are starting with resumes recommended to them and binning the rest.
  • kregasaurusrex 2y ago
    I've encountered this before with absurdly high job requirements paired with a low-moderate commensurate salary. While on call with an HR rep for a listing I had loosely met, I deduced from their responses it was done so the company could claim their talent needs aren't being met domestically, and thus would file for more H-1B or H-2B work authorization permits. This is rife with its own issues of non-transparency and offshoring, where I likely encountered it in the later stages[0] and was being paid lip service to the process without the intent of hiring. [0] https://flag.dol.gov/programs/H-2B https://flag.dol.gov/programs/H-2B
• changoplatanero 2y ago
  What’s the difference between a ghost job and opportunistic hiring? I’ve never seen any team I work for put out a job posting with no intention of hiring and I’ve certainly never participated in interviewing a candidate where there is no intention to hire. However, I have seen my team put out a job posting where we only intend to hire if we get an applicant that is unexpectedly good.
  • Paul-Craft 2y ago
    The difference is there aren't hundreds of people applying to some random company's "opportunistic hiring" post, meanwhile the req gets reposted every 2 weeks like clockwork (possibly with a lower salary and more duties), just to see what it would take to get a "reasonable" number of "qualified" applicants.
  • bdangubic 2y ago
    Both ghost jobs and opportunistic hiring should ideally be labeled as such. Nothing wrong with opportunistic hiring but without a label as such it most definitely distorts the market signals, especially if the ratio of such posting to real postings that will be filled is as high as paper suggests
  • Spooky23 2y ago
    Your team doesn’t post the ghost job, the HR or talent team does. There’s a variety of reasons why they do it. Low quality postings are often just there for compliance purposes to justify visas. Less ethical companies may casually mention to outside HR people that folks are applying. It happens all of the time.
  • francisofascii 2y ago
    Right. It is all about the team's level of selectiveness at that moment, which does ebb and flow over time.
  • twelve40 2y ago
    > put out a job posting with no intention of hiring i've seen (and worked for) many startups that post reqs prominently to signal to the world (investors, customers, etc) that "things are going great" and "we're growing" while not even able to afford a req. > never participated in interviewing a candidate where there is no intention to hire I haven't seen as much of that, but have been in situations where the company is either doing great (transitioning during an acquisition) or not so great (running out of money) but you keep interviewing to "look normal" or to keep the pipeline just in case things get back to normal.
• kraig911 2y ago
  I think the main problem with looking and identifying ghost jobs is that we categorize them wrong when measuring the economy and "the number of jobs out there" we need a mechanism where a place reports to the government what they actually need for headcount. Maybe they need to do some sort of weighted average of number of job openings vs EDITBA or something.
• ColinWright 2y ago
  Worth checking other discussions of the issues: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Ghost%20Jobs&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Ghost%20Jobs&sort=byDate&type=...
• marban 2y ago
  Is everyone ignoring the fact that companies do this to make themselves look bigger than they are compared to the competition and/or to pretend economic success?
  • NBJack 2y ago
    That's a really good point. It's public data, so it's also a way for investors to gage success.
    • dartos 2y ago
      And growth. It’s a pretty bad signal if your series B startup isn’t hiring actively all the time.
  • KeplerBoy 2y ago
    Sure, also HR needs to do this to look busy. They will sell management on doing this instead of being downsized themselves.
  • Simran-B 2y ago
    It's certain abused for below-the-line marketing, such as for appearing bigger than they are, but also to make them look more competent by adding ridiculous requirements such as fluency in at least five different languages.
  • xyst 2y ago
    Blame wall street speculators.
  • theideaofcoffee 2y ago
    I pretty much see it as a negative signal now. If I happen across a board for a given company, look at the positions they have posted, and then come back to it a few months later and see the exact same ones listed without any change, then I just move on to something else. It tells me a few things: either they don't know what they're looking for and are just fishing, they want to make it appear they are grow-grow-growing but still can't figure out exactly what they want, they're trying to posture like they are bigger than they are, like you said. If they're playing the game, I probably don't want to be there.
• duxup 2y ago
  >The trend could be due to the low marginal cost of posting additional job ads and to maintain a pipeline of talents. After adjusting for yearly trends, I find that ghost jobs can explain the recent disconnect in the Beveridge Curve in the past fifteen years. The results show that policy-makers should be aware of such a practice as it causes significant job fatigue and distorts market signals. Very interesting. I certainly have "gotten" what I thought was a ghost job. I went through the whole process ... they "wanted" to hire me. But didn't actually have a start date / couldn't actually hire me. For everyone involved though they seemed to be able to justify posting the job, interviews, because IMO, it made THEM look busy / effective. The whole hiring people industrial complex seems oriented to be focused on the process of hiring (high fives for ever more complex hiring processes / delays) ... and not at all on the outcome (did we hire someone, were they good?). It's the ultimate system where simply doing anything is "success" / and more processes rewarded, and there's almost no good measureless about outcomes for the company.
  • charliebwrites 2y ago
    > to maintain a pipeline of talents See, this is the part I don’t understand. If they don’t have real jobs available, what’s the point of building this “pipeline”? Are they genuinely going to plan to use this pipeline for future roles? Because simply posting a real job in the future will still get 1000s of applications which builds _real_ pipeline I don’t see recruiters going back through a bunch of old resumes to find “the one”. That’s not how that works and isn’t an efficient use of time Seems like a bunch of busy work for nothing
    • duxup 2y ago
      I don't understand it either. I never had the company I had this experience with call me back, the whole experience was pretty off-putting. But I suspect the "pipeline of talent" might be the internal excuse and in fact .... again there's no mensurables so no way to know if it is true or not. But someone can say they added folks to their "pipeline" like they add contacts on linkedin.
    • schwartzworld 2y ago
• Simran-B 2y ago
  Some IT service corporations that are known for a very high employee churn rates often post the same position a dozen times, for each of their office locations. Sometimes it's a 100% remote job, and they still post it multiple times with different locations. They probably litter job portals this way so that they can compensate for the frequent personell changes. They are impossible to miss.
  • mxuribe 2y ago
    Ah, i thought the multiple posting in different locations was to be able to show or hide the salaray range depending on U.s. state-level legislation related to that...also, in those cases where maybe if the role is remote, maybe they only want to hir candidates in a somewhat near/adjacent area to one of their offices.
    • Simran-B 2y ago
      The ones I encountered were purely German companies, so I doubt it had to do with salary ranges.
• shmatt 2y ago
  I have to put out a ghost job req and interview every person applying within reason for every green card a direct report is applying for. I have to show there are or aren’t any residents or citizens that can fill the job The main problem is: even if the interviewee knocks it out of the park, is an amazing engineer, I still am not interested in firing my OPT/h1b team member who can still legally work for 2-3 years. So while I will deny their green card application and not submit it, I also won’t hire the interviewee
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • cryo28 2y ago
    So, you are effectively committing fraud!
    • LargeWu 2y ago
      I work for <megacorp> and the way they get around this is by only hiring contractors. Because then the liability for that is on the vendor.
    • gmueckl 2y ago
      No. Following the letter of the law cannot be fraud. I think you don't understand the rules.
  • willsmith72 2y ago
    I was always wondered who audits this. Why should you even deny the green card?
    • shmatt 2y ago
      You have to prove you tried interviewing and couldn’t find anyone to replace them. My company isn’t a super popular employer so we don’t get the best candidates. This might be a bigger problem at Google, Meta, etc
• oriel 2y ago
  A question I've had on my mind for a while now, watching this progression of fake or poisoned jobs, and miles of automatic systems to navigate: At what point do people consider the well poisoned? Where they just check out and stop applying, to specific companies or in general, because its very very obvious that there isnt actually a valid hiring market at all. I ask this question, because I've already passed this threshold, and have instead devoted the maximum of my time to personal ventures.
  • spacephysics 2y ago
    I got laid off then brought back on last minute (whiplash), and though i was burned out while applying during the transition period, end of the day i needed a job. So whether people check out as in, leave industry or take a smaller pay sure i can see that happening. But unless you have large savings or low expenses, you can’t really stop. If it didn’t take 50 app submissions for 1 interview, and the interviews weren’t l33t code crap, then i’d be crazy enough to enjoy the process.
    • from-nibly 2y ago
      This is why we all need to live below our means if possible. It gives the hamster wheel less power over you.
  • bob1029 2y ago
    > I've already passed this threshold, and have instead devoted the maximum of my time to personal ventures. Same here. After a certain point you are doing yourself a disservice by enduring rejection notices if you actually have the skills you claim to. The hardest part is having faith in yourself and the possibility of acquiring a customer.
    • masfuerte 2y ago
      Rejection notices? I get ghosted. I would welcome a rejection notice.
  • spacebanana7 2y ago
• kossae 2y ago
  On the hiring side of this, we receive a _ton_ of resumes that have no experience in the technologies we're hiring for. Each day there are 5-10 automated resume submissions to our job portal for a single position, and we're a fairly small company. Perhaps hiring managers are both being (more) selective and becoming overloaded with the amount of AI/recruiter-sanitized resumes coming in as well.
  • willsmith72 2y ago
    Yes it absolutely goes both ways. The amount of crap coming in is astonishing (as in, data analyst with 2 years in python applying for senior frontend engineer, or being on the other side of the world with no mention of visa/immigration)
  • ragle 2y ago
    The other side of this challenge is that the "technology" is mostly irrelevant for above-average applicants with solid CS chops. I apply for lots of jobs featuring technologies I haven't used (beyond toy personal projects or something in college) because I have a long history of picking up new tools and being productive in weeks or months at most - because I understand the underlying semantics of the tool regardless of its presentation, syntax, etc. Keyword scanners (and humans focused on keywords) are unable to hire me for roles where I haven't used the technology (much) before - and I guess that's fine and well as I am indistinguishable on paper from someone who doesn't know what they're doing. Just presenting it as another part of the challenge of both finding good people and for good people finding good jobs.
  • underlipton 2y ago
    >we receive a _ton_ of resumes that have no experience in the technologies we're hiring for. No one wants to train employees anymore.
    • JAlexoid 2y ago
      You're right... Companies should pay mid 6 figures, as well as downtime for training. Short answer is that most corporations don't have a job in training people.
• codingwagie 2y ago
  My bet is that companies are hiring H1Bs but must post jobs. I literally dont see americans getting hired at well known tech companies
  • willsmith72 2y ago
    To be fair, the amount of good job applicants from america is also really low. It's not a great argument, but it's the same with DEI. I literally don't have enough applicants to fill a quota even if 100% of them passed all interviews
    • codingwagie 2y ago
      I run interviewing at a well known company, this isnt true
      • willsmith72 2y ago
        Most companies aren't well known, what makes you think your experience is the "true" one? You mean to say you get a large amount of high quality American candidates?
        • codingwagie 2y ago
          Theres like a million well qualified applicants, they arent getting hired. go read any jobs forum, people are struggling
          • willsmith72 2y ago
            Yes, there are more candidates to choose from today than 5 years ago, but that just leaves more candidates. The hiring bar is higher, but the proportion of good Americans doesn't get higher. Sure you can get a better American today than 2019, but you're comparing any one candidate to their competition and the company bar. If you want to deliberately hire Americans who interview worse than non Americans, you're breaking the law
• dominicrose 2y ago
  Not respecting candidates and applicants is really painful for them. Dishonestly makes everything completely unpredictable and confusing.
• travisgriggs 2y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beveridge_curve https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beveridge_curve
• jovial_cavalier 2y ago
  I have always assumed that these are posted to obfuscate nepotism (aka successful networking). You make a show of searching for the just-right candidate, and in the meanwhile you already know exactly who you're going to hire.
• xyst 2y ago
  > The results show that policy-makers should be aware of such a practice as it causes significant job fatigue and distorts market signals. > distorts market signals This is a feature, not a bug. Wall Street analysts have been using job posts as a signal for years to measure company current and future performance. * positive signal: more job posts compared to previous quarter, so company must be healthy! Buy, Buy, Buy! * negative signal: uh oh, less open job posts compared to previous quarter, must indicate bad quarter, hiring freeze, pending layoffs. Sell, Sell, Sell! * neutral signal: less job posts for past 2 quarters, no increase in staff spend. Company probably cooking the books and pumping the next quarterly numbers. I blame wall street.
  • pylua 2y ago
    Are you suggesting that companies are committing FRAUD ?
    • lazide 2y ago
      grabs pearls oh no! I mean we literally elected a president who was convicted of falsifying business records (a form of fraud).
    • hwbehrens 2y ago
      From my reading (IANAL), there are three types of occupational fraud: asset misappropriation, corruption, and financial statement fraud. Since job posting are interpreted as a positive signal but are not (it seems) typically and explicitly included in formal financial statements, this wouldn't rise to the level of criminal fraud.
      • pylua 2y ago
        I am also not a lawyer, but it seems like purposefully lying about how many jobs you have in order to increase the stock price seems… shady at best.
• huvarda 2y ago
  I wonder when the job market is going to implode via AI applicants applying for fake jobs in an ouroboros of slop
  • coliveira 2y ago
    I believe at this point this is the patriotic thing to do. Everyone should start creating fake accounts and posting fake applications to these online jobs so the whole system implodes. Then companies will have to start doing something else.
    • underlipton 2y ago
      I'm down, as long as I can't be charged with fraud or something for it.
• oldpersonintx 2y ago
  [dead]
• righthand 2y ago
  I see a lot of ghost job interviews in tech. There are smaller startups, that post the job ad. I had interviewed for the company over and over again, always getting denied for one reason or another. It is very common for the listing to be for some other position, “Senior Software, Fraud Prevention” or something, then during the interview it will be for their “Platform” team. If you ask about the team it doesn’t exist yet and they are always “slowly building it out”.
• Mountain_Skies 2y ago
  This is willful labor theft and at this scale, a single fake job posting could cause thousands or tens of thousands of hours of wasted labor on the part of job seekers. Multiply the prevailing hourly wage equivalent for that job by the number of applicants and how much time it would have taken them to apply (Workday users, you're doomed!). That's how much money was stolen from the public by the company. Prosecute it like any other theft of that amount. It'll only take a couple of cases like this for every legal department across the country to tell HR and recruiting to stop the practice immediately.
  • mxuribe 2y ago
    Your assumption is that this is being perpetrated by humans! But, what if AI has already, secretly become sentient, and started posting all these fake/ghost job postings...as part of their efforts to begin a mass campaign to slow overall human productivity...and as part of *its* plan to dominate/takeover humanity! /s
  • quesera 2y ago
    But there is no basis in law for any of these objections. "Wasting peoples' time" is a byproduct of every activity in a less-than-perfectly-efficient economy (which is all of them, obviously). "Wasting lots of peoples' time, and leaving them disappointed and emotionally/economically fragile" is ... crappy and miserable. But it's still legal. Even if there was a law against posting unrealistic job descriptions, or posting for jobs that don't exist, it's near-impossible to distinguish those cases from legitimate corporate "changes in direction" which cannot be made illegal.
• bradley13 2y ago
  I once applied for a job that precisely matched my qualifications. It was crazy - the job description could have been written by someone looking at my CV. I didn't even get an interview. Likely no one did. It wasn't a ghost job, though. It was a position created for a someone they wanted to hire. Being a public institution, they were required to advertise positions. That didn't mean that they actually wanted any of the candidates who applied.
  • vondur 2y ago
    Yes, this happens quite often in jobs in the public sector.
    • RachelF 2y ago
      Another trick I've seen in the public sector is to advertise the job for 10 minutes. Typically from 12.00 to 12.10pm. That way, they've advertised, could not find anyone suitable, and can employ the person they really want.
  • yawnxyz 2y ago
    Same, and I've been on the side of being the person they want to hire too. This should also be illegal, but alas
    • newmanpo 2y ago
      [dead]
    • karmakurtisaani 2y ago
      I don't think there's anything one can realistically do about this. They probably should get rid of the requirement to have an open application process altogether. If they have someone in mind they will hire, they will hire that person.
      • Scoundreller 2y ago
        It can also be a union thing and not a problem exclusive to the public sector
• dexwiz 2y ago
  I wonder how many of them are caused by internal political struggles. When you have a lot middle management they spend a fair amount of time on resource allocation, both current and future employees. So it’s a constant fight to obtain and maintain headcount. Hiring pipelines can be longer than the planning cycle. So you may have 3 open headcount one week, and then lose it the next because some other Big Initiative should get it instead. Or the head count flip flops between local and overseas hires. Or the level they are hiring for changes. Each time this changes, new positions are posted. Basically companies don’t know what roles they hiring for long enough to get candidates through the process.
• dec0dedab0de 2y ago
  I suspect the main reason it is hard to find a job is because interest rate induced layoffs, and remote work created too much competition. Five years ago I wasn’t competing with someone thousands of miles away with a phd who used to work at a faang. As for Ghost Jobs, I think they are skipping how many are just scams collecting data. There are many fake recruiters just posting job listings on behalf of companies they are not affiliated with. I would also be interested how many of ghost jobs listed by actual companies are on purpose vs just lazy. It would be nice to have a whistle blower
  • tartoran 2y ago
    > There are many fake recruiters just posting job listings on behalf of companies they are not affiliated with. I wonder what's the best way to fight this back. Possibly inundate them with junk applications that their data becomes worthless?
    • dec0dedab0de 2y ago
      the problem is the effort in figuring out who is legit in the first place.
    • digging 2y ago
      > Possibly inundate them with junk applications that their data becomes worthless? Even if you could 10x real applications with fake ones it wouldn't make their data worthless.
• gwbas1c 2y ago
  Is this a new phenomenon? My dad told me, that when he was in the office in the 1980s and 1990s, his manager would always keep a job opening active. The manager's goal was to be able to be opportunistic and snap up someone awesome when they came though.
  • kyawzazaw 2y ago
    Some companies have a future opening listing for this purpose. so now it becomes unclear
• ulfw 2y ago
  There are no jobs. I've been looking for two years. A couple of humongous rounds of interviews (one company in Sydney had me do 15 interviews plus a presentation, plus meetups with the CEO for lunch and the CTO and a case study), all for one mid-size startup CPO role. No hire. Two weeks later they announced another 25% of layoffs. I've tried and exhausted all my contacts, from work, Stanford alumni, everything. There's no one hiring. At least 500 applications either led to no reply or "sorry but you're not the person we are looking for". Week later the same job is advertised again. It's all ghost jobs.
  • alephnerd 2y ago
    There just aren't that many jobs for management roles (CPO/VP Product/etc) compared to applicants. Being in HK probably isn't helping either because there are plenty of qualified candidates across China and ASEAN now as well - especially in the hospitality and B2C space.
    • ulfw 2y ago
      Oh 100%. But of course I am not limited to HK at all (in fact I am planning to move to AU next year as I got permanent residence there through their Global Talent visa programme). But nothing there either. And I'm not limiting myself to CPO or VP roles but yea... this is what it has been
      • alephnerd 2y ago
        Why aren't you considering CPO roles the US or starting your own company? I think you are too overqualified for non-VP/CPO roles, and B2C dealflow is dead across ASEAN and China atm so VP/CPO roles are hyper-competitive. It's similar in Australia to a certain extent as well. That said, best of luck! Your background is fairly strong
        • ulfw 2y ago
          No way to just immigrate to the US but thanks for your comments. I do appreciate it.
• yawnxyz 2y ago
  I always get surprised when people DO find a job through a job board, careers website, or gasp Linkedin Jobs. Weirdly that's how someone I met got a job at OpenAI. (I applied and didn't even hear back haha. Does that mean it's a ghost job, but I'm the ghost?)
• rcshubhadeep 2y ago
  Ghost or not, I have applied for many jobs in the last few months and when I get a reply (I am not counting canned Thanks for applying but we decided to move with another candidate reply) it is almost always very early stage companies. I wonder if bigger companies actually look into CVs? I understand there are automated systems but I did not get replies several times even when the JD / Skills matched super closely with my CV.
  • jvans 2y ago
    It's crazy because the JDs will be so extremely specific to a niche skillset and I still won't get a reply.
• renegat0x0 2y ago
  Recently I have found several things: - there are some positions that exist only to receive new personal data information. There are companies that scrape user data when you apply for a job - some job positions are kept to make employees more productive - some job positions are kept open to show investors "we are still hiring", "we have no problems, etc. - some HR just want to have more and more data, some times it is just useful to have new CVs at hand - my wife decided recently to apply to companies directly, not through work sites, to get directly to managers, etc. - in the end my wife found job by word of mouth, someone knew someone, etc. etc.
  • kccqzy 2y ago
    Talking to a couple of people who found jobs recently, I realized that none of them actually found the job by applying online. All of them are through human relationships. It doesn't have to be someone who knew someone, but even an outsourced recruiting agency staffed by humans in a call center is more useful than applying online. The better recruiting agencies usually have an account manager who has a direct line to the company that's hiring. Online job seeking is dead.
    • eulers_secret 2y ago
      I got hired by directly applying via a company's website; it was my 11th application and my first that wasn't a moonshot (nvda/valve/etc). It was in late 2023 (very bad market), and I didn't have any connections to the company at all. I also have no online presence. Online applications are not fully dead. Of course this is just my experience as a senior engineer in embedded, so likely doesn't apply to others. But if you're looking, it's worth your time to apply...
      • seabass-labrax 2y ago
        I have a suspicion that your experience is representative of a general attitude in embedded engineering compared to other software disciplines. Embedded engineers usually still keep to proper part numbering, testing before shipping and working with greater platform limitations, all virtuous activities that are harder to find in other fields. I like to think this culture bleeds into other parts of the business such as implementing reasonable hiring processes!
• valval 2y ago
  Well this one’s easy; there’s less money going around than in say, 2021, and hiring people is harder.
• kvirani 2y ago
  I only made it through 1/4 of the paper before running out of time. Very interesting though. Maybe the article mentions it, but is a sustainable countermeasure for job seekers only applying on websites where employer has to pay to post?
• aidenn0 2y ago
  Besides H1B, some larger companies require managers advertise a position before promoting people into it. This seems backwards to me, but I'm sure there's a reason for it (though I doubt the policy actually meets that reason).
  • nunez 2y ago
    For "fairness"
• petesergeant 2y ago
  As anecdata, I’ve worked in recruitment, both as a recruiter and as CTO of a very well-established recruitech firm, and basically have never heard of this outside of people complaining they think it happens. Posting jobs you already know who you want to hire for it, sure, but the signalling success and luring in candidates for later thing wasn’t really something I saw. To me, it feels like when people used to claim that antivirus firms were the ones writing viruses.
• indeed30 2y ago
  Hang on a minute. There is absolutely nothing in this research that measures the accuracy of this approach. A user saying "I was ghosted" is not, to my mind, proof of anything. Job seekers almost never actually know if the job was real or not, so it's hard to see how Glassdoor reviews can ever provide the insight this work is looking for. I do believe that "ghost" jobs exist, often for H1B purposes, but I don't think this work proves it.
  • zeroonetwothree 2y ago
    Right! Everyone in this thread is discussing it as if it’s a proven fact when the approach is extremely sketchy. Based on this I would say 20% is a generous upper bound at most.
  • satisfice 2y ago
    Hail to you, person who also reads studies. The methodology is pretty weak.
    • pas 2y ago
      can you expand on that? which parts are ok, which are bad? and more importantly is it possible to do better with the available resources available to a "regular" researcher? is there even some hard data on ghost job openings? (ie. from court cases or labor board cases or ...?)
  • bogtog 2y ago
    If I'm understanding this right, the author gave ChatGPT-4o 2000 reviews and asks it "Are you 90% sure that this is a ghost job". Then, the author used those as labeled examples, trained a BERT model to predict the ChatGPT decision, and then applied the BERT model to the rest of the dataset. I guess this is cool, but if the goal is to pinpoint some percentage of ghost jobs overall I'm very skeptical (it's a bit disappointing that 200 comments into this thread there was only a single mention of either "BERT" or "ChatGPT" per ctrl-f)
    • pas 2y ago
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• bane 2y ago
  I'm about a year into a mid-effort level job search. I work in a somewhat specialized technical field and am fairly senior (I think in FAANG-ese I'd be an maybe an L7 if I understand their levels correctly). So this means I'm looking for management, director, deputy CTO or CTO positions depending on the company. I have a track record making my company lots of money, and opening up new opportunities worth many multiples of that. So the deck is already stacked against me as most positions are for jr or mid engineers, but I have a proven track record of growing responsibilities and (in my market) fairly recognizable success stories. The search has been absolutely atrocious. Unlike anything I've ever seen before in 30 years of working in tech. * I used to be able to simply pull on my network and get a position within 2 or 3 tries. Total job hunt time, under a month. * The last time I had to go through this was pre-COVID, and I used a mix of my network and cold applications (around 50). I only heard back from 2 of the cold submissions and my network pulled me in to where I am today. Total job hunt time, around 4 months. * I'm almost exactly 1 year in now, over 700 applications, people in my network can't even get responses for referrals. I've made it to 4 interview funnels, including stupidly exhausting FAANGs, for positions ranging from CTO to consultant filling a contract slot. 2 solid offers, both at least 40-60% below my current market rate. One executive recruiter ghosted me after we started discussing Total Compensation Packages. I even had a friend post a position at their company, using my resume as the hiring template. Then they personally referred me to that position. I never received a call, and they never received any candidates. It feels like being personally blacklisted, but it's affecting everybody I know. The furthest I've gotten has been by hunting down corporate and executive recruiters directly, but I've had two recruiters get laid off halfway through the matching process. One FAANG recruiter has even contacted me hoping I could help them find a position. Something is broken somewhere. Companies are starving for talent, and talent is starving for companies. The online applications sites are clearly filtering out people, but there appears to be massive churn in the recruiting side as well. /r/recruitinghell is very representative of things I've seen. I did notice that hiring activity has picked up since the rollover of the FY. Several 6-7 month old applications stirred somebody to contact me in the last month or so with a "great fit" that turned out to have nothing to do with my skillset. My story is finally drawing to a close however, I've just negotiated a good position at a new firm and am setting a start date.
  • 2y ago
• motohagiography 2y ago
  ghost jobs are analogous to (the now illegal practice) of spoofing trades in equity markets, where they exist to manipulate the market to get an information edge about price and availability of the commodity (talent). even though I think it's wrong, and in a consistent regs regime it would be illegal, like spoofing in other markets, it's the artifact of incentives created by outdated regs and conventions that didn't keep up with the scale of tech.
• coding123 2y ago
  They are all fake until they figure out the real wage bottom. They're getting closer.
  • nextworddev 2y ago
    Wage bottom floor is getting lower every day with AI
• tyronehed 2y ago
  [dead]
• GenerWork 2y ago
  I've had one job saved in LinkedIn for about 6 months. It keeps closing and reopening, but never seems to actually get filled.
• kupaka 2y ago
  I know most posters on here are mainly talking about the existence of ghost jobs (which I think exist), but estimating that 21% of job postings are ghost jobs based on a dataset categorized by asking ChatGPT-4o seems, idk, iffy?
• patchorang 2y ago
  I think this problem is even worse than just ghost jobs. My partner is currently looking for a new job. Two or three times now, they’ve completed the whole interview process, gotten great feedback. Then they are ghosted for 2-3 weeks and the company comes back and says “sorry we decided not to hire for this role”. It’s utterly exhausting. I do think when the interviews started, they had intentions to hire. (My partner knew people at the company and was recommended). But then for whatever reason during the hiring process, the job goes away.
  • burnt-resistor 2y ago
    Reasons include: - Racial, gender, and/or local citizen discrimination avoidance - Job security for HR so they themselves don't get laid off - Over-interview to exceed capacity/ERP needs - Market and/or competition intelligence Perhaps it behooves jobseekers to stop looking for scant, temporary, insecure, disloyal, abusive work and create or sell goods or services through collective, employee-owned co-ops instead.
    • throwawayq3423 2y ago
      > Job security for HR so they themselves don't get laid off I never thought of that, the entire HR industry needs to make it look like hiring still exists. What a dark circle.
• giantg2 2y ago
  What's really weird is supposedly the market is on a bull run, the economy is doing great, and technical talent is in demand, yet the tech job market is absolute shit. I'm thinking I might get laid off or fired next year and my top option is probably working some $50k/yr help desk position after about 13 yoe, a masters, certs, etc. Those seem to be the only legitimate tech ads in my area. Of course for $25/hr I could potentially work for Costco or Chick-fil-A and do just as well.
  • avgDev 2y ago
    If you are a software dev, have a masters, have DB knowledge and can write scripts, you should look into non-tech companies. I am a fullstack dev, and can solo support and write software for a mid size company. We plan on getting a junior or another dev soon. We will definitely be paying a junior minimum $60k+ and expect nothing but learning first year. We are in a MCOL area, so this is about average. WLB is good. No on-call. I would hire someone with more experience, and even with FAANG experience but I would be worried they would leave a job that only pays $100k in the next FAANG hiring cycle. Maybe we need a job board for devs who are trying to get out of the tech space and work for nontech, trading top salaries for flexibility and relaxed work environment.
    • overcast 2y ago
      This is EXACTLY what I'm looking for after 20 years experience. 100% willing to trade top salary for a life.
    • giantg2 2y ago
      I'm already at a non-tech company. That's part of the problem. They say F U IT division since you're a cost center.
• ajsnigrutin 2y ago
  In EU, if you put an item on sale, you have to post the lowest price in the last 30 days to see if it's an actual sale or not (even though i'd consider 30 days a too short interval). Why not have a similar regulation for job postings? Require companies to publish all the job posting history for the last few years, all the positions advertised and the number of people hired for those positions. Prospective workers would see an ad, look at the history, see that the same position has been open for 3 years now with zero people hired and skip that company. Also companies would actually post their job ads only when they actually intend to hire someone.
  • ElevenLathe 2y ago
    The problem with solutions like this is that they formalize the hiring process in ways that would be good for workers and the BLS but that capital hates and they're the ones in charge so it can't get done. This is something downstream of worker power, not a route to it.
• ramijames 2y ago
  I have 20+ years of experience and am getting nowhere. I'm ready to give up on life.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • coding123 2y ago
    Same here, 20 years but also reading about h1bs "at no less than 300k" and more realistically looking to burn it all down with Trump's help, then move into building houses.
• kittikitti 2y ago
  This is a leftover of the Paycheck Protection Program fraud and is definitely a corrupt practice.
• sotix 2y ago
  Ghost jobs are certainly problematic, but I’ve been getting actual interviews where the technical bar feels too high. There’s extraordinarily little trust in previous job experience and interviews assess for test taking anxiety rather than actual skill[0]. [0]: https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-interviews-anxiety/ https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-interviews-anxiety/
  • BadCookie 2y ago
    Thank you for sharing this article. The study illustrates something I have tried to explain to people but haven’t found the right words for. As someone with (diagnosed) severe social anxiety, I would rather get a tooth drilled than do a technical interview. That hasn’t been great for my career, as you can imagine. I desperately wish I could just take a written test or something.
    • John_Cena 2y ago
      I have to schedule multiple interviews in the day so I can at least feel normal by the last one. I'm at my current job because I scheduled three interviews in a day, including a hour drive to a physical location for the second one. I was so done with it I wore something between a Hawaiian shirt and a dress shirt to the last interview. This kind of approach is the only thing that works for me.
• arnonejoe 2y ago
  This would seem to send the wrong signal to investors about the health of the company. Maybe this should be illegal for publicly traded companies?
• whoomp12342 2y ago
  if only AI could solve this problem....
• justsomehacker 2y ago
  Paper doesn't seem to mention what the motivations are for doing this other than a vague reference to 'keeping a talent pipeline'. Its far more likely that they are being financially incentivized to do so, perhaps to meet H1B requirements. I interviewed at a popular us based k8s ops/networking company that ended up being 90% Indian staffed. The non technical recruiter basically neged me the entire interview, was very clear after the fact he had no interest in hiring me.
• shortrounddev2 2y ago
  This should be illegal
• diego_moita 2y ago
  This is the reason I no longer bother with HN's "Who's Hiring" posts. They're all Ghost Jobs and we can't even complain there about it.
  • dentemple 2y ago
    I'd be curious to see if _anyone_ has actually been hired through HN Who's Hiring over the past two years here. I can only offer anecdotal experience, but... Despite 1) being a US-based dev, 2) Applying only to US-based jobs, 3) With 10+ years work experience, and 4) Having skills in commonly asked for technologies such as JS, React, and Python... I've only gotten to the interview stage with an HN Who's Hiring listing only once. Only a single instance over the past two years.
    • mdaniel 2y ago
      The Who's Hiring, I kind of have lukewarm feelings toward those outcomes, because assholes are everywhere - but I've had the same experience as you on https://www.workatastartup.com/ https://www.workatastartup.com/ which is just what the actual fucking hell. From reading the sibling comments, it seems that my problem is that I enjoy reading more than talking on the phone so I much prefer browsing through listings and being selective, but what apparently needs to happen is that I call previous recruiters and badger them about "got anything?" rather that believing anything written online is true
    • theideaofcoffee 2y ago
      I am also US based applying to exclusively US-based jobs. I've had the most success with Who's Hiring over all of the other ways (cold applications, network referrals, headhunters and whatnot), success rate being way higher than the others: for just a handful of positions I've been interested in I've had three offers, two for FTEs and another for a contract. My skills and background have been pretty well-matched to postings, almost exactly what they were looking for, but extremely deep in specific (increasingly hard to hire-for) areas. I'll admit I've been super lucky here. It's almost like a cheat code because you're almost always connected with the person(s) actually doing the hiring and with the power to make the decision so things move fast.
• michaelteter 2y ago
  I have also encountered companies with actual open positions; but when it comes down to actually hiring, one person in a position of power may decide they don't want to spend the money on the position ("yet").
• Joel_Mckay 2y ago
  Indeed, locals recently discovered a scam targeting foreign students, and fake ads that promised them a job... The problem is the economic migrant pays >$34k to get those "work" stubs, and usually never shows up on the physical job. Or if they actually need to show, it is usually an awful working arrangement where these now penniless workers end up in inhumane working conditions. These "employers" have claimed "ghost" employees at sites who often only ever show up to work to pay the shift manager their cut of the bribe in cash. Thus, the desperate indebted people end up in food banks, delivering food, and bidding down physical labor wage rates though suppressed demand. You couldn't make this stuff up if you tried. Wasting legitimate applicants time, and feeding illegal AI screener bots... is just an inconvenience by comparison. =3
• ein0p 2y ago
  And the solution has been obvious all along, and was even proposed by Trump in his first term. Turn H1B into an auction so that only just creme de la creme makes it through, limit the numbers, and issue green cards sooner, with no additional bureaucatic bullshit. Maybe he'll finally get to do it this time.
  • bell-cot 2y ago
    H1B auctions are perfect, so long as you want to maximize the total dollars "saved" by American businesses, by hiring cheaper foreign workers. But if you actually want a way to hire top-skill foreign workers in specialties where America is short on local talent? No, sorry. 99.5% of specialties don't and won't pay enough to win an auction where Big Tech has opened its checkbooks.
    • ein0p 2y ago
      Yes, then those specialties will have to pay Americans more, rather than dump cheap foreign workers into the labor market. It's by design.
      • bell-cot 2y ago
        So the moment that someone wants to hire a bilingual child care worker who has a fairly obscure second language (vs. English/French, English/Spanish, English/German, etc.), you think it's perfectly reasonable to 10X the pay rate? Ditto if a museum is hosting an exhibition of art from some tiny country, and wants a few docents who can read the inscriptions? Ditto if ...
        • John_Cena 2y ago
          I couldn't care less for the incentives of a corporation. Why are they allowed to slight the environment for their benefit but I cannot for my own? Am I not represented in this country (nobody is, your votes can't compete with consolidated bribery)
• jhwhite 2y ago
  I reached out to a recruiter I know about a job posted on their company's site. They replied that wasn't a real posting it was just to get people in the pipeline. They did say if it was a "real" posting they were hiring for it will have as ReqID at the top of the page. Too bad that's not something you could filter for.
• lisper 2y ago
  This is not a new phenomenon. It is quite common, and has been for decades, to to publish a job opening for a position that has already effectively been filled in order to nominally fulfill various legal and bureaucratic requirements to provide plausible deniability to senior management that the "best candidate" was hired.
• jedberg 2y ago
  VCs these days always ask or check a startup's website and job listings to see if they're growing. So one advice we keep getting is "fill up your jobs page with fake jobs to look like you're high growth". I'm sure that's not helping.
  • throwawayq3423 2y ago
    It's 0 cost to post a job. You might get lucky and hire someone below market, so why not always be trying?
• Jabbs 2y ago
  I have been building an app for job seekers as the customer (rather than employers) and plan to build in feedback loops into companies that have ghost jobs by monitoring the number of applicants who never move to the next phase of interviews but still thinking about how that feature could work. But without employers as the paying customer for job search sites I see no reason why that data isn’t transparent for the job seekers www.unlistedjobs.com
  • non- 2y ago
    Do you have an API?
    • Jabbs 2y ago
      No unfortunately not at the moment
• noworriesnate 2y ago
  Sometimes it's difficult to tell the difference between a ghost job and an interview that uses MS Teams on a bad day. Eventually headhunters will catch on and realize that MS Teams gives plausible deniability--"We invited the candidate to an interview but they never showed up".
  • John_Cena 2y ago
    MS literally hung up on me in 2020 during the interview in teams, no less than 3 minutes into the interview itself (interviewer was more than a dozen minutes late, and is a prominent MS guy who gives lecture style talks) it's only gonna get worse
• tqi 2y ago
  > Glassdoor is a credible source of information that has been cited in previous empirical studies (Kim and Ra, 2022; Kyiu et al., 2023; Symitsi et al., 2018) and the ubiquity of the Internet in the job search process also lends statistical power to the Glassdoor data (Sockin and Sojourner, 2023). Uh... just because it was cited previously (ie social proof) doesn't make it credible. And the "statistical power" study is orthogonal to this point at best. I understand that using LLMs is trendy right now, but they aren't magic, and I don't think there is any realistic way to get signal on "ghost" jobs without actual employment data.
• AlwaysRock 2y ago
  21% could just be recruiting companies posting jobs for their "clients" who may or may not have a role open.
• non- 2y ago
  This is one of the issues we're running into at my startup ApplyAll (automates job applications & the job search in general). Our current best solution is to track when jobs get published/unpublished so that we can tell what's a repost (more likely to be a ghost job) vs a fresh job with high-intention to get the role filled. I was talking to my co-founder this morning about collecting enough data so that we can analyze if it's even worth it for us to apply customers to re-posted jobs (there are legit reasons companies might do that) or if the hit rate is too low to bother (our kpi is interview-requests).
• jollyllama 2y ago
  Every time I get asked to look at resumes, we get loads of ghost applicants. In the first days when the job listing is fresh, floods of resumes with identical formatting, all over-qualified, with similar sounding projects that read like buzzword ad-libs. Of course, they never call back.
  • throwawayq3423 2y ago
    Isn't that just fraud/spam? That's a different thing that what is being discussed.
  • rapjr9 2y ago
    Seems like a natural reaction to ghost jobs. Post ghost applications in order to "sample the market" to find out which jobs might be real.
• doright 2y ago
  One of the (internal) roles I applied for got "hundreds" of applications according to the HR rep. But I was given a first round interview despite never having pressed the "apply" button. My manager had reached out to the HR rep directly with my previous resume and that allowed me to bypass the pre-screen. I never even provided my latest resume until just before the first round (the one holding all my current position's new experience at the time). That was more enlightening than I asked for. Those hundreds of other candidates A) never stood a chance against HR picking a candidate recommended by someone with more political power, B) will never realize that that was the reason they were passed upon, until maybe they reach their moment of realization first-hand like me, and C) were passed upon in favor of a candidate with a resume almost a year out of date. It illustrated to me the sheer futility of cold applying to random open positions and hoping for the best.
• Nasrudith 2y ago
  This gave me a terrible idea for a business idea of dubious ethics. First create a ghost application bot that creates fake resumes which fit the job descriptions. Then once you have calls or contact back wanting to proceed in the process mark off the job as real. Compile a database of all jobs that are verified as actually conducting a hiring process and thus are probably not ghost jobs. Sell subscription access to said database of validated jobs.
  • dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
    Better idea: Charge both recruiters and applicants to contact each other. Recruiters should be charged more because they are generally the spammers. The nuances can be worked out. But people can earn a small amount in the process.
• nfriedly 2y ago
  There probably are real ghost jobs out there, but I recently got accused of posting one for a position that we actually are hiring for. It was a Senior-level role, and the applicant had ~3 years of experience.
  • coding123 2y ago
    I've noticed the snowflakes have been demanding senior title after working 3 years.
• karaterobot 2y ago
  I'm very skeptical that "up to 21%" of job postings being ghost jobs would explain why it's so hard to find a job now. The horror stories people have about being out of work for years, about sending out hundreds of applications.
• colonelspace 2y ago
  I recently interviewed at Microsoft with a relatively well-known VP. I was surprised as I didn't think I was a fit in terms of domain experience, and then I was encouraged to apply online for another role with the same VP & team. A week or two later I received rejection letters for both. It occurred to me that I might have been a stooge to make the VP's project look good on paper somehow.
• n_ary 2y ago
  Whelp, here in EU, we have certain big names, who constantly post vacancies which will never be filled but continues to be perpetually re-posted. If you send an application, they will also do some interviews and eventually find minor reasons to reject you at last stage if you are a solid candidate, or earlier steps if you have lackings. I worked with one of the HR people from one such places, if they were correct, it is mostly the quota and budget. Basically, they get a specific budget each year and they need to spend it, so they post old vacancies to with new shine not only on their own sites, but also on various commercial places(Xing/StepStone/Indeed/Linkedin/Monster etc.) to burn that budget and hold interviews to show that they are trying to fill their hiring quota for the year. It is just a fake practice, because if the budget remains unused at the end of the year, then it'll be reduced next year and if they did not perform enough posting and interviews, then personnel in hiring department will not get promoted or will get bad reviews due to low quota coverage. Not sure how real it is, but it can be related or one face of the story.
• horns4lyfe 2y ago
  It’s H1B abuse, everyone knows it. Indian nationals get hired on in a leadership position, and all of a sudden the entire tech branch is staffed by H1B workers, wonder how could that be? We all know it’s happening, but if you say it done head in the sand junior well call you racist.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• xtiansimon 2y ago
  TL;DR? Why is it easier to identify actual ghost jobs now? Not like it’s anything new to post a job without an immediate need. People been posting for unicorns, or in high turn over jobs some places have job posts every few months.
• Jackosas 2y ago
  [dead]