> but many openings sit for MONTHS which just does not line up with the anecdotal evidence of people going 6-12 months without an interview much less an offer

Neither of these things are evidence of “ghost jobs”.

When I was doing a lot of hiring it would often take months to find qualified candidates for basic roles. I would get 100s of applicants per month but only about 20% of the resumes I received were even close to qualified. I’d try to schedule intro and screening calls with the qualified ones who would actually respond, but you wouldn’t believe how many applicants would have unreliable communication skills. Some times I wouldn’t get a response from someone for weeks or more, but many just don’t respond to contact after applying to your company. If we’re using the lingo I think a lot are “ghost candidates”.

There’s further fallout through the interview pipelines as you discover how many people have lied on their resume or otherwise aren’t qualified. That self-styled C++ expert who can’t give an example of RAII or the self-proclaimed TypeScript expert who doesn’t know anything outside of vanilla JavaScript. It’s weird.

Then there are negotiations. Some candidates want to collect offers from multiple companies and will ask for delays in hiring so they can continue interviewing and getting other offers. It can take weeks for some candidates to accept or decline your offer. If they decline you have to go to the next candidate, which can take more weeks, and then on to the next. If there’s relocation involved it takes longer to decide and get it done.

Then some times we’re hiring multiple people for a row, so we leave the listing up and open to continue hiring. This really angers the “ghost jobs” people because they assume 1 listing == 1 hire, as if the company needs to close the listing and then copy/paste to a new URL for the next hire.

So job openings that exist for “MONTHS” are not evidence of ghost jobs.

The people going 12 months without an interview are almost always doing something wrong. You wouldn’t believe how inexcusably bad many of the resumes out there can be. Some people are hung up on applying only to jobs they aren’t qualified for and then wonder why they’re not getting interviews.

Some of these offers may be part of visa or green card processes. Some require a labor market test in the form of a job ad and recorded response to it. If a suitable candidate applies, the visa/immigration process fails. Still, most companies don't intend to actually hire in this case as far as I understand it.

I think that is slightly blunted by this person looking at the week over week delta.

True, but is there any reason to think this dishonesty varies over time? The trend could be informative even if the raw numbers are nonsense