from Hacker News

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

by JSeymourATL on 11/14/24, 2:35 PM with 567 comments

by shmatt on 11/14/24, 2:56 PM
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
by duxup on 11/14/24, 2:54 PM
>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.
by indeed30 on 11/14/24, 3:33 PM
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.
by oriel on 11/14/24, 2:56 PM
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.
by renegat0x0 on 11/14/24, 3:27 PM
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.
by sotix on 11/14/24, 4:04 PM
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/
by marban on 11/14/24, 2:53 PM
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?
by codingwagie on 11/14/24, 2:59 PM
My bet is that companies are hiring H1Bs but must post jobs. I literally dont see americans getting hired at well known tech companies
by changoplatanero on 11/14/24, 2:47 PM
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.
by dexwiz on 11/14/24, 3:11 PM
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.
by kossae on 11/14/24, 2:57 PM
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.
by ulfw on 11/14/24, 3:18 PM
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.
by patchorang on 11/14/24, 3:46 PM
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.
by dec0dedab0de on 11/14/24, 3:11 PM
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
by righthand on 11/14/24, 3:06 PM
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”.
by rcshubhadeep on 11/14/24, 3:25 PM
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.
by Simran-B on 11/14/24, 2:55 PM
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.
by huvarda on 11/14/24, 3:05 PM
I wonder when the job market is going to implode via AI applicants applying for fake jobs in an ouroboros of slop
by gwbas1c on 11/14/24, 3:13 PM
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.
by motohagiography on 11/14/24, 3:37 PM
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.
by n_ary on 11/14/24, 7:43 PM
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.
by ColinWright on 11/14/24, 2:52 PM
Worth checking other discussions of the issues:
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Ghost%20Jobs&sort=byDate&type=...
by jovial_cavalier on 11/14/24, 3:03 PM
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.
by kupaka on 11/14/24, 3:44 PM
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?
by diego_moita on 11/14/24, 4:21 PM
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.
by ajsnigrutin on 11/14/24, 3:53 PM
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.
by nfriedly on 11/14/24, 7:02 PM
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.
by justsomehacker on 11/14/24, 4:12 PM
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.
by travisgriggs on 11/14/24, 3:03 PM
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beveridge_curve
by colonelspace on 11/14/24, 7:22 PM
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.
by doright on 11/14/24, 6:37 PM
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.
by Joel_Mckay on 11/14/24, 5:03 PM
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
by jollyllama on 11/14/24, 6:17 PM
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.
by aidenn0 on 11/14/24, 3:29 PM
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).
by Mountain_Skies on 11/14/24, 3:08 PM
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.
by non- on 11/14/24, 6:17 PM
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).
by kvirani on 11/14/24, 3:28 PM
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?
by Nasrudith on 11/14/24, 6:43 PM
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.
by Jabbs on 11/14/24, 5:41 PM
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
by kraig911 on 11/14/24, 2:50 PM
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.
by dominicrose on 11/14/24, 3:02 PM
Not respecting candidates and applicants is really painful for them. Dishonestly makes everything completely unpredictable and confusing.
by kappi on 11/14/24, 2:44 PM
In tech, ghost job listings maybe as high as 50%. Another reason for ghost job listing is to meet the requirements for visa processing.
by jhwhite on 11/14/24, 5:09 PM
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.
by lisper on 11/14/24, 5:37 PM
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.
by noworriesnate on 11/14/24, 6:04 PM
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".
by jedberg on 11/14/24, 5:37 PM
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.
by karaterobot on 11/14/24, 7:19 PM
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.
by michaelteter on 11/14/24, 4:23 PM
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").
by arnonejoe on 11/14/24, 4:06 PM
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?
by GenerWork on 11/14/24, 3:44 PM
I've had one job saved in LinkedIn for about 6 months. It keeps closing and reopening, but never seems to actually get filled.
by horns4lyfe on 11/14/24, 8:31 PM
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.
by petesergeant on 11/14/24, 3:31 PM
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.
by Taylor_OD on 11/14/24, 6:08 PM
21% could just be recruiting companies posting jobs for their "clients" who may or may not have a role open.
by xyst on 11/14/24, 3:05 PM
> 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.
by valval on 11/14/24, 3:27 PM
Well this one’s easy; there’s less money going around than in say, 2021, and hiring people is harder.
by coding123 on 11/14/24, 3:40 PM
They are all fake until they figure out the real wage bottom. They're getting closer.
by ramijames on 11/14/24, 3:57 PM
I have 20+ years of experience and am getting nowhere. I'm ready to give up on life.
by giantg2 on 11/14/24, 3:47 PM
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.
by shortrounddev2 on 11/14/24, 4:12 PM
This should be illegal
by tqi on 11/14/24, 6:08 PM
> 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.
by kittikitti on 11/14/24, 3:58 PM
This is a leftover of the Paycheck Protection Program fraud and is definitely a corrupt practice.
by yawnxyz on 11/14/24, 3:23 PM
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?)
by whoomp12342 on 11/14/24, 4:10 PM
if only AI could solve this problem....
by bane on 11/14/24, 3:37 PM
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.
by ein0p on 11/14/24, 5:03 PM
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.
by bradley13 on 11/14/24, 3:10 PM
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.
by xtiansimon on 11/15/24, 4:17 PM
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.