As a hiring manager, I have to write the job description. HR is responsible for posting the damn thing where people can see it, then into the ATS you go. We also know recruiting posts can be a source of competitive intelligence and signal for investors. We don't want it used that way, but we're aware of it. Bit of a dirty secret. That means, alas, the only people hurt are the applicants looking for work. I'll work through the queue when I have a billet to fill, but otherwise... You're shouting into the void. Not sure who is responsible for reporting headcount increases to BLS, but I've actively looked and never found the person. So... I honestly have no idea how they get their numbers unless there is a pipeline from the major payroll processors; which feels kinda ick if you think about it.

I had an AI-agenerates answer for you, but then I realized something deeper: moral hazard.

> Moral hazard is when one party takes actions that impose costs on others because they don’t fully bear those costs themselves. With ghost jobs, employers get benefits (brand signaling, resume mining, internal optics) while job seekers eat the time, emotional, and sometimes financial cost of chasing something that never really existed.

There's a dozen different angles all coming out at once. I'll try to summarize some.

- really wants to hire H1B, but needs to pretend to interview first for compliance. These usually have absurd requirements to make it viable to reject anyone.

- really wants to do an internal or referral hire or promotion, but needs to interview for HR compliance. These usually have such specific requirements that only the person they want qualifies.

- posts jobs because a company wants to look like its growing, even when it's not.

- posts jobs to either signal to an employee that they are replaceable, or to try and relieve a stressed employee that more help is coming. Either way, it's a bluff

- yes, sometimes you want to hold out for the perfect unicorn and are not in any way in a rush to find them. There's no distinction for this, but job posts are cheap so why not?

- outdated posts that still stay up because There's no rush to take it down.

- a technique used to lower compensation. They post a job, see how many applications it gets. If it's more than enough, they take it down (with no interviews) then put it up once more at a lower rate. Repeat until not enough people apply. This may or may not lead to interviews because the actual goal is market probing.

-purely to advertise the company instead of actually hire. Usually done at career fairs where you talk and realize there's no actual open positions.

AI training?

There's a IT careers site that was sold, I believe, went through a re-branding. And now they also offer AI and "personal" resume reviews _and_ writing, cover letters, and they even have members do a 10-15 minute AI virtual interview that ostensibly could be shown to a hiring manager.

I was unemployed as a PM for about three month. I applied to in the order of 100 roles at this site, as well as applications on the other sites you'd expect, from LI to more niche.

I felt that this site was "underperforming". Jobs I'd applied to that I'd only really seen on there I'd never heard from. I saw jobs that were advertised in other places on there too.

What sealed it for me was that towards the end of the three months, I got an email from the site. "Your profile has been viewed". I open it, "An employer is looking at your profile". I'd never seen this type of email from them before, and sure enough: "Your profile has been viewed 1 time in the last 90 days". That was it. No contacts, and only one employer has even looked at my profile on the site (and this is the kind of site where that'd be the only place they could look at your application). And that employer didn't even have positions open.

But the site does ask you questions to "submit to the employer" about "why you want to work here" "why you'd make a good fit", etc.

And I'm entirely convinced that the jobs they're advertising are only (a very small) fractionally "real" and ever reviewed by anyone at all (maybe the "promoted" jobs?), and they're harvesting positions and jobs from other sites or employers (there's no positions that don't actually seem to exist, or at least not ads)...

... and that their chief motivation for this is getting all your answers to train their models for their actual revenue generator - AI resume writing, cover letter writing, etc. All pre-seeded with other people's real answers to such questions.

Two reasons. One, they have already filled it internally but legally have to post the job. Two, they are gathering data on market trends and what salaries people will take, which is useful if they are considering firing people and rehiring with lower salaries.

I've applied for many jobs where I was perfectly qualified and got rejection notices immediately. I applied on a Sunday and got rejected on Sunday an hour later. No human reviewed that application I made, it was auto rejected, and if that's the case, what other explanation is there than "ghost jobs."