'Ghost jobs' are on the rise – and so are calls to ban them

> Dr Escalera adds that she has also heard examples of companies posting jobs to obtain and sell data.

How is that not illegal? Pretending to offer jobs just to suck in resumes to some database just seems like it should be illegal. Or just like running scams is illegal but they are in another country "so tough luck, you'll never get us"?

Ghost jobs are essentially the 'vaporware' of the HR world. In any other department, misrepresenting your intent to engage in a transaction would be seen as a breach of professional ethics. The fact that it has become a standard KPI for HR departments to 'keep the pipeline warm' at the expense of thousands of hours of unpaid candidate labor is a massive market failure.

I am not sure if more regulation is a solution, but the lack of respect for job seekers is a real problem.

And not just with ghost jobs. My recent experience as a job seeker was harrowing - even with large, proud companies. I would pass multiple rounds of interviews with senior/director-level interviewers only to never hear back from the company - even after a direct request for an update or feedback. Just total ignorance. Again, this happened with a FAANG+ company.

In the US a lot of these are pseudo postings for immigration applications. They are technically posting the job, but in pt 3 for on page 72 of a random newspaper in a hope that nobody sees it and applies so they can say “we couldn’t find anyone so we need a visa/green card.”

That’s starting to get cracked down on, but it’s been a mess and a sham for a while.

I was an employment counselor in the late 1990s. Even then, ½ to ¾ of realistic, worthwhile jobs were phantoms.

FF to now and hiring portals silently drop viable applicants for a long list of never disclosed reasons. I know temp agencies that hire, send the employee out on 1 job then never again.

I've never know a time when hiring wasn't crap for entire classes of viable applicants.

We could at least require that all applications have a standardized format for resumé and a list of legally allowable questions.

No more requiring the candidate to do 30 minutes of data entry to encode their resumé into your HR system.

Then a ghost job wouldn't really waste much time, since uploading a JSON should take 30 seconds.

>it’s to raise stock value by fake growth indicators

how does that work as a growth indicator, are there any known organizations that track your growth based on how many job postings you do, and then use that data to indicate your growth?

I don't doubt that it could happen, but if it did we would have to know about it, I also don't doubt that I don't know about it, but I would like to know.

>I would pass multiple rounds of interviews with senior/director-level interviewers only to never hear back from the company - even after a direct request for an update or feedback.

That is very disrespectful and reflects badly on that company.

I'm pretty sure the technical test for one Job application I had was just to solve a particular android testing problem they couldn't figure out.

My guess is that most of these jobs actually exist, in the sense that if a stellar candidate were to present theirselves, the organization would find a way to hire them.

Atleast in Europe there are some basic rules around data collection. In places like India, linkedin is a free for all vacuuming up resume data. I've seen the same jobs on linkedin appear for nearly 4 years with no changes and hundreds of people applying every week.

You cant flag it on linkedin either. I guess LinkedIn's business model likes the fake job postings.

> "Others, we found, were inflating numbers and trying to show their company is growing, even if it's not."

Sounds like a fraud against investors? That could be a way to attack this problem because in the U.S., many issues get turned into laws and regulations protecting shareholders.

Part of me thinks its to see what the competition is doing, see how others are using ai, to train ai, steal ideas/clients (common in the ad/marketing/design) world, train staff to hire, get free consulting.

Some say it’s to raise stock value by fake growth indicators or motivate employees that they are replaceable, but I think those 2 are just partially the case.

Years ago, there was a job agency advertising an IT banking job in the Caribbean. Every week. For years. Apparently it was just a way for them to harvest CVs. 'Sorry you didn't make the interview for that job, but can I interest you in a role creating TPS reports for a company in Slough?'.

Scummy behaviour. But I guess they got away with it.

I wish I had a job

But honestly I settled with my unemployment.

I just don't want to deal with all the bs of applying, and playing nice with recruiters. Either they need me or they don't. I don't want to play games.

I don't have the privilege of having a degree or being well networked, or being a great developer.

It's a market. There can't be a job for everyone.

"...wonders how they're actually going to monitor and regulate this. I don't think the government has the resources..."

This. Imagine the bureaucracy. The cure would be worse than the disease.

This has been going on for as long as I remember. Often they have decided who will go in but still advertise the position and even interview for it.

My first job was in an industry where "ghost jobs" had a different meaning. Local mafia used to add fictitious names to the worker register at work sites, and someone would come and collect the pay in cash every month. The daily work reports would show these workers as engaged in some house-keeping work.

A lot of head hunters will dangle job offers that don’t exist just so they can get info on the company you’re working at - basically they’re trying to keep tab on who’s in charge of hiring, so they can contact them.

There are also those who are paid by your boss just to see if any of their team members is looking to take off.

I don’t think there is anything new here though. These practice have existed for a while, and there’s not much you can do about it.

I was applying for a while last year. Spending hours to write a cover letter and then either hearing nothing or getting a canned rejection letter is super frustrating. I've come to the conclusion that putting effort into an application is time wasted, so from now on AI is writing pretty much every single one of my cover letters.

Doing that allows me to send out 5 applications in the time it normally takes me to do 1. Since I've seen no actual correlation between effort and success, I figured quantity will give better results than quality. Of course, I might put in actual effort for an opening that I find really interesting, but that's an exception.

The biggest irony is that the majority of HN's own "Who's Hiring" are ghost jobs.

That thread is just bullshit.

I worked in recruiting for a long time and I can tell you I never saw much in the way of any deliberate strategy to create fake job posts.

The thing is that whether or not a job exists at a point in time is far less black and white than you might naively think.

There are many reasons for it to be somewhat grey and banning the practice doesn’t really mean anything because you would have to quantify precisely under what circumstances a job is allowed to be advertised and as I say, it’s not as clear as you might imagine.

There is absolutely not a one to one relationship between a job and a job ad.

Can we please get back to using job fairs already? Why are companies so irritatingly resistant to getting back to doing things in-person and real-time?

I know companies that are posting vacancies that currently don't exist in order to keep good candidates on the hook. They tell the candidate that we should keep in touch for when the company is ready to hire them.

I am not sure if it's bad or not. It's true that it kinda wastes the candidate's time. In some cases though, the candidate is so good that the company will create a position just for them.