28% of job postings on company career sites have been open over 90 days

This statistic constantly confuses people who haven't done hiring.

If we decide we're going to grow headcount by 10 senior software engineers, we don't copy and paste the same job listing 10 times. We leave it open and collect resumes through that. At a large or fast growing company, we might never stop interviewing and hiring senior software engineers. The listing stays open for a year or more.

There are also specialty roles where hiring takes months. I've had niche roles open where we didn't get any applicants with any experience on the topic for over 90 days on multiple occasions.

There are some browser plugins you can use for job sites like LinkedIn to filter out Ghost Jobs. It's been somewhat helpful, but honestly it feels like 90% of tech jobs right now are Ghost jobs.

It's happened so many times. Apply for a job, within an hour get an email that says I am not qualified (not true), and then a week later the same job gets posted again.

I'm normally a pretty free-market guy, but it should be illegal. It's clear-cut fraud - they are advertising something that doesn't exist, specifically to game numbers. And what's more, governments report on these numbers as if they are real job opportunities in the economy.

I talked to a hiring manager friend at a big company you've definitely heard of. I was looking for a job so I sent him a link to one of his jobs and said "can I interview for this?"

He said: Oh, I have 23 recs on the job site but none of them are open. They just keep them there to make us look like we're still hiring like crazy.

Every time I've hired someone at a big company, it's taken multiple months to get candidates through the pipeline, and it was not uncommon to have to go back to the candidate pool when someone would accept an offer and change their mind before starting. 90 days to fill a role would be considered relatively quick.

This has been a problem/norm for many jobs for many years now. If you haven't had to deal with it before now, consider yourself lucky.

A small anecdote from the cleared space (security clearance jobs). If you look through websites like clearedjobs, you'll notice that you see the same sets of cyber jobs posted over and over and over. All from the same companies in the same locations. Come to find, it's simply because they can't find people desperate enough with good qualifications to work for low wages in HCOL areas like northern VA and DC. Companies that want unicorn analysts/engineers with 6-10 YOE, TS/SCI, degree, and extensive, specific experience to relocate to northern VA for 130k/yr - 5 days in office - standard crappy contractor benefits. Shocked pickachu face when practically no one will accept those terms who actually qualify.

At least in my country, a job posting that stays up forever isn't a ghost job. It's a company that can't keep people. Either the conditions are brutal or the pay is garbage.

I was under the impression a large % of jobs posted on jobs sites are done simply for compliance reasons and because HR has some "bullshit jobs" parts to it and the companies will usually simply hire from within the company itself.

I conduct interviews pretty often for various levels. Interviews seems so broken from both sides. Hard to find jobs that aren’t ghost jobs. Hard to find candidates that won’t cheat using AI and actually know their stuff. Just feels like AI has made hiring in tech even more inefficient which says a lot.

72% of job postings on company career sites are closed within 90 days. Pretty sweet.

I sent a few CVs recently trying to get a fully remote job and the experience has been miserable.

From what I can tell the job posting have been opened for a while, companies are inundated with CVs thanks to them offering remote and form the screening feedback I had (when I was lucky to get any feedback) it was basically that they can be as picky as they want and hire people who matches every single one of their requirements.

On the flip side at my work (FAANG, not remote) we barely get any CVs from people who can pass the technical screening. Most the candidate fail so badly it’s not even funny

Probably a lot of those that have remained open will also stay that way, because they are (1) fake job ads, or (2) job ads of companies, where you don't even reach a human soul during the application process, and the companies don't realize how broken their hiring process really is, or (3) job ads of companies, who have so unrealistic idea about what they are looking for and what they themselves are actually offering to attract whomever they are looking for, that almost no one applying meets the criteria.

Probably I also forgot some more categories of crazy hiring processes in my enumeration.

I've about given up looking for a remote job even as a software engineer with over 20+ years of experience especially with macOS since I never seem to get a reply or "no longer accepting applicants".

It is clear signal but its causes are multiple and I am not sure what percent attribution each one has:

1) Roles with high turnover. Likely the posting stays always on. 2) The pay is bad and nobody takes the job. 3) The role is too niche and the candidates in the market with visibility to the role are very few. 4) Aggressive hiring. Candidates have many options and until they actually show up at work, you keep interviewing other candidates. 5) Forgotten posts / ghost posts (my gut feeling says that this is the lowest contributor to the spike we observe, as likely it should be flat over time)

As someone that's currently looking (with plenty of experience, corporate, startup, and contract), can confirm it's pretty rough out there. I think the application process is just becoming enshittified: because HR uses AI to filter, applicants are starting to use AI to apply, so we have volumes and volumes of nonsense flowing back and forth.

Been working professionally for ~15 years or so, and it's never been this bad. Other than "knowing someone" (i.e. a referral, and even that falls through routinely), not sure what the best way to snag a position is these days.

I've been hearing people looking for jobs with (to me) weird theories about fake/ghost job postings, that the employer never plans to fill... they have various theories of why (hypothetical) employers would do this that I don't quite follow.

Has anyone else heard of/seen this, or can explain where it's coming from or if it means anything?

We need to make a law making it punishable to jailtime for posting fake, ghost, harvesting job postings. The proof is things like this - a posting for longer than 90 days.

Sounds like there are too many white collar employees and not enough white collar jobs. The market can pick and choose, wait for the perfect candidate to pop up.

This is common everywhere. Employers are leaving open job listings and just wait and see who comes along.

Career sites would do well to automatically close job listings after 90 days or so.

Meaningless stat. My company keeps our website job listings open indefinitely and it's because we're always hiring. We're just extremely selective.

Ghost jobs! Tremendous dataset. Hospitality and education roles listed near the top are likely strong signal the wages are inadequate and a refusal to raise the wage to a market clearing price. Healthcare is self explanatory, demand is voracious due to a rapidly aging population and wages available and appropriate in many cases.

> Hospitality postings sit the longest: 43.9% have been open more than 90 days, median 65 days. Healthcare turns over fastest at 19.7%.

(kudos to unlisted for aggregating and reporting, this gives me a data point to offer to jurisdictions and regulators interested in compliance monitoring in this context)

Nobody has a solution for hiring.

We have AGI before we have general purpose hiring.

Yeah because they ask for low level kernel 10yoe specialists AI llm inference training phd people lol

How do we know if this is normal or not? You really need a historical time series to know if it has always been like this or not

Why is OP being downvoted to [dead] in every single comment here?

Could also mean 28% of "job" postings are not functioning as described.

Whenever you hear of labor shortages, it is almost always a euphemism for a shortage of people desperate enough to tolerate a terrible working arrangement.

The "AI" slop from staffing agencies, lead-generators, applicants, and data scrapers... have dropped the signal to noise ratio into spam number territory. =3

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