Job boards are still rife with 'ghost jobs'. What's the point?

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240315-ghost-jobs-digital-job-boards

by billybuckwheat • 2 years ago

98 86 2 years ago

bbc.com

BobbyTables2• 2 years ago

I’ve seen this at a Fortune-50 company, on their own website!

Project managers got requisitions from HR and so they posted a job opening. (So far so good)

However, the company instituted hiring freezes for 2-3 quarters of each year. No hiring, even for the open positions…

Later, there would be layoffs, so PMs would trade unfilled requisitions with HR instead of firing existing people.

It mattered little in the end because they axed the entire department (up to the director) and rebuilt it overseas.

None of this was ever visible publicly.

dan-robertson2• 2 years ago

I guess at least this is better than hanging on to people you don’t want in a team so they can be laid off when the demand comes in to avoid being forced to give up the people you do want.

datavirtue• 2 years ago

Sounds like a dystopian shit hole.

jimbob45• 2 years ago

Why not just fire them? Severance isn’t guaranteed yet in the US and just cause isn’t that hard to document (I’m genuinely asking - HR fascinates me).

al_borland7• 2 years ago

As someone who has worked in an environment like this for a long time, those people still exist. Everyone on the team generally knows who’s at the bottom and would get let go. Ideally there are enough open positions to cover the layoffs, but that’s not always the case.

tracker15• 2 years ago

I have a friend who works for a major aircraft mfg (that may have suicided a whistleblower) who's seen this kind of activity for the better part of a decade over and over. Currently going through a relatively credit migrate everything to the cloud effort.

stavros• 2 years ago

This is odd, because, if anything, the Boeing 737 Max has been migrating off the cloud.

drewcoo• 2 years ago

Even in the before times (before they were run by MBAs), that company was notorious for boom/bust hiring/firing of both blue collar and white collar workers.

al_borland7• 2 years ago

This has been standard practice where I’m at for at least a decade. I don’t know if the jobs were even posted, but we always felt short staffed. It turned out the Sr Dir would always hold back at least 3 position and leave them unfilled, so when layoffs came (which happens at least twice a year), he could simply give up those reqs and it would appear to the team that we were unaffected and operations could keep running as normal.

It wasn’t until I made it into the VPs inner circle that I found out how the game was played.

avidiax• 2 years ago

I have also heard that managers like to keep job postings for every role up if employment conditions create a flight risk. If someone gives their 2 weeks notice, there is a nice long pipeline of would-have-been ghost candidates for their role, which speeds up recruiting the replacement by a month at least.

johnnyanmac4• 2 years ago

This seems really stupid if I'm understanding correctly. So layoffs come as a way to reduce costs, and instead you can give up an empty seat that probably at best had a few thousand dollars of labor trying (not) to hire for? This sounds like a hiring freeze with extra steps instead of a layoff.

And ofc the concept of skilled labor needed year round needing to layoff people twice a year is a failure in and of itself. Why not just contract the job at that point? government nitty griity details, I'm guessing?

red-iron-pine2• 2 years ago

It mattered little in the end because they axed the entire department (up to the director) and rebuilt it overseas.

burying the lede

it's a shell game / chaos situation while they ultimately implement cost cutting.

fungi• 2 years ago

i assumed it was an immigration scam to say company couldn't fill the role locally as a prerequisite for getting someone in on immigration work visa?

_tik_• 2 years ago

Yes, this is what happens in Singapore. There is a requirement to post job vacancies on a government job portal for a certain time before a company can apply for a work visa. Many companies maintain ghost job vacancies just in case.

downrightmike2• 2 years ago

The government should treat these are trash and send out fines.

EdwardDiego• 2 years ago

NZ also. Used to work in social security, posting jobs with us used to be sufficient to say "we tried to hire locally, but no dice".

So we'd get positions like "Chef for Asian restaurant, must known how to cook food Sichuan style and must be fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese, $10ph"

(At the time, minimum wage was $9ph)

You weren't getting a chef for $10 ph, you're not even getting a cook.

And definitely no-one who is fluent in your desired languages.

Ditto the golf coach required, some golf certification required, fluent in Japanese and Mandarin, $10 p/h.

internet101010• 2 years ago

Or they already have them and want the EB2 application lock-in.

mianos2• 2 years ago

Yep, many of these same ads on seek here in Sydney. I applied for one once and I had a few completely fake interviews that had someone just asking buzzword bingo questions. It was completely senseless until a few searches lead me to what was going on. It was surreal a the time. I didn't know what was going on.

Now, years past, I am thinking it would be fun to do this again for a youtube video like kitboga or Jim Brown.

johnnyanmac4• 2 years ago

The labour market is tightening – and it's getting harder to find a job.

as a small rant, I am getting tired of the whiplash between "it's harder than ever to find a job" and "the economy has recovered and unemployement is record lows". This is normally easily explainable but these seem to both be bipartisan points from my browsing on the topic. So I am simply perplexed. -------

On topic: Ghost jobs are such a weird concept in this day and age. As we see here, it is extremely easy to get hundreds, thousands of resumes within days of a job posting, so why pretend to keep resumes on record to call people on later? The latest I've been contacted about such a role was some 5 months later, and that was due to a referral randomly pinging the company for a tangential job. Otherwise, anything that hasn't responded within a month may as well be cast to the void.

The most common lip service seems to be what you expect:

Half the respondents reported they keep job listings open indefinitely because they "always open to new people". More than one in three respondents said they kept the listings active to build a pool of applicants in case of turnover – not because a role needs to be filled in a timely manner.

Exactly my point. But maybe it's just me. Has anyone ever had a >1 month response from a company that has experienced turnover?

More than 40% of hiring managers said they list jobs they aren't actively trying to fill to give the impression that the company is growing. A similar share said the job listings are made to motivate employees, while 34% said the jobs are posted to placate overworked staff who may be hoping for additional help to be brought on.

Well, these seem to be the more brutally honest answers. Fraud is probably too strong a word, but this does feel like exploitive behavior that should be reigned in.

dan-robertson2• 2 years ago

Regarding the start of the topic, just note the world is not homogeneous. For example the US economy/job market is in a better state than the uk one; there are seasonal fluctuations in demand for work that keep statistics always changing; some jobs may be more in demand than others (eg low-skill wages were going up in the US while big tech companies did layoffs). And the news story is so often on the complaining side (eg that there are no jobs or that there are no workers) where I think it can be easy to not notice that the direction changed.

ghaff4• 2 years ago

It's also simultaneously possible to have low unemployment numbers and have companies be pretty deliberate about new hires and have people tending to stay where they are.

And, anecdotally, I see mostly pretty senior people leaving--maybe retiring a bit early. Was just having a conversation about this with a friend of mine.

downrightmike2• 2 years ago

More than 40% of hiring managers said they list jobs they aren't actively trying to fill to give the impression that the company is growing.

Sounds like securities fraud

myth_drannon• 2 years ago

Only if it's publicly traded company. 20ish people startup, anything goes.

Keegs• 2 years ago

I am getting tired of the whiplash between "it's harder than ever to find a job" and "the economy has recovered and unemployement is record lows". This is normally easily explainable

I’m curious. How can these be true at once?

jfoster• 2 years ago

One sector booms whilst another busts.

jyunwai• 2 years ago

The bank J.P. Morgan recently published an analysis about employment in the US [1] (this is the best source I could initially find with no paywalls and a non-superficial, sector-by-sector look at the data). According to the report:

* "The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that the U.S. economy added 275,000 jobs in February." However, "unemployment rose to 3.9% in February, the highest rate since January 2022." In January 2024, the overall employment rate was 3.7%.

* "A spike in construction, retail and food services jobs contributed to the surprising gain in employment in February."

* "Payroll gains in February were distributed across many areas of the economy. Health care, leisure and hospitality and government led the way, contributing to almost three quarters of the job gains."

This matches with the anecdotes that I've been hearing from day-to-day conversation: certain sectors such as health care and the service industry are short on people, whereas openings are far fewer in other sectors such as technology. However, I couldn't find employment data specific to the tech sector in this brief report.

[1] https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/outlook/economic-outlook/j...

mvdtnz• 2 years ago

Tried to hire a plumber or concrete placer lately? Prepare to be ghosted or given a "fuck off" quote. However, place a listing for "web developer wanted" and you'll drown in applicants. It turns out that when fields close to technology and media tighten up, the techno-media bubble lose their minds about it. Not so much when the labourer market dries up.

UncleOxidant• 2 years ago

as a small rant, I am getting tired of the whiplash between "it's harder than ever to find a job" and "the economy has recovered and unemployement is record lows".

If you're in tech (as most of us are here) it can be pretty tough to find a job right now unless you have mad AI skillz. But in other sectors it's generally pretty easy to find a job right now. So both can be true depending on what sector you're in.

bigthymer• 2 years ago

I just watched an investor talk about any field that is effected by changing yields (interest rates) is getting crushed but others are doing fine. Tech was probably the most sensitive field but I think construction and banks are also effected. Construction is complicated because data centers are doing fine while multi-family and commercial are screwed.

johnnyanmac4• 2 years ago

I wish that was true, but I was also going around to staffing offices the past few months looking for any temp work to make ends meet and almost all of the dozen staffing agencies said that roles were sparce right now. So if nothing else it seems like it's not tech exclusive. It's weird because I am still at least getting recruiter calls, but I'm simply being cut very early in the process more often, so I don't necessarily want anything too long term

This is in Los Angeles by the way. I hear California in particular has higher unemployment than average, so maybe it's a local issue.

Kluggy• 2 years ago

I had applied for one job via linked in a few years back and it was entirely a scam to do data collection. They kept asking for more and more info about me. I stopped responding when they wanted to run a credit check and asked me to email them my social security number.

yieldcrv3• 2 years ago

This is why you put typos and obvious flaws earlier in the communication, so you only spend time dealing with less discerning people

I think scammers rely on that too much, in other faster moving areas I think looking exactly like official communication will get higher quality marks, but for recruiting typos are the way

gruez• 2 years ago

1. Why would scammers care? Presumably it's a numbers game for them, and most job applicants are genuine, so why would they bother screening out people with bad grammar/spelling?

2. If you're a job applicant, wouldn't having obvious typos/grammar issues make you look less professional? Also, "bad spelling/grammar = scam" is a heuristic that people use as well, so you're effectively banking on the fact that the employer is desperate enough for a rockstar engineer that they'll interview anyone who applies.

tracker15• 2 years ago

I kind of think that is the case with Jobot. I don't think I've ever communicated or talked to an actual person.

aussieguy1234• 2 years ago

Usually, if I see a role i'm interested in is more than 1 month old, I won't apply. In the current market, I would probably reduce that to 2 weeks.

shams93• 2 years ago

What's worse is the clueless Feds count each of these as real jobs.

perrygeo• 2 years ago

I've seen these before. Someone is under a lot of pressure to hire/build a team. Hence the job posts. But they're not given any hiring power or budget. Hence ghosting. Most companies would rather leave the job open unfilled than admit they can't/won't fill it. I mean, how do you go back to a candidate and say "I'd love to hire you but I got overruled and now you're 6 months in the hiring backlog, sorry about our internal politics." But take the job post down - never! The position isn't filled yet!

tracker15• 2 years ago

We really appreciate your time and effort in applying for $Position. We've decided not to move forward with your candidacy at this time. Feel free to apply for other open positions at $site.

fbdab103• 2 years ago

I will take a rejection! Way better than the application going into a black hole. My favorite is when the company remembers to clear out its inbox, and you receive a rejection for a role you applied to some 10+ months ago.

underlipton3• 2 years ago

That this is widespread is a blanket indictment of America's executive and managerial classes. Maybe start laying them off.

nebula8804• 2 years ago

How? Please tell us as we desperately need an answer. They just go and infect every company. It is still generally considered an achievement to get a business degree from an elite school in some circles so the pipeline is not going away either.

heavyset_go• 2 years ago

It costs (little to) nothing to keep them up, so why not do it?

al_borland7• 2 years ago

They need to bring back the newspaper model. Change per word and for each day it runs.

Joel_Mckay2• 2 years ago

Data miners, staffing agency lead generation firms, and phishers...

Some are brazen enough to advertise their "AI Powered HR tools" as they waste applicants time. In some places it is a crime to collect personal information without a time constrained retention window, and honest disclosure of intended use-case.

The fact remains that unless a company has posted a recent position on their site it likely won't exist for general applicants.

Best of luck, =)

vlachen• 2 years ago

The recruiters are the worst. Or, as you put it, staffing agency lead generation firms. I had not recognized it as such, but the truth is the truth. And that description the fucking truth.

What follows below is a rant, and you can ignore it if you like.

Most of these sorts of contacts come from Linkedin, where I have an up-to-date profile showing the nearly 11 years of work in mechanical product and equipment design as a Mechanical Design Engineer, a few of those years being an Engineering Manager for a small automation group.

I keep getting hit up by recruiters for positions that, frankly, would be a career change. "Our client has an urgent need for a structural engineer." Well, that's great, of course, but I'm not one of those. That's really a branch of Civil or Architectural Engineering. Not Mechanical. "That's OK, you're still a great fit."

We end up going through the process of finding out the compensation, where I question: Are you sure they're going to be willing to pay someone who is new at this job the same salary as someone who's been working in their field for over a decade?

I'm talking to these people because I rarely pass on learning about an opportunity. There's a chance for me to go for my Professional Engineer license in these gigs, so it's worth exploring a little bit.

Invariably, we get to the point of receiving feedback from the hiring firm and the response is "Well... you aren't a structural / Professional / MEP / BIM engineer, which is what we require." Bonus points for that part of the feedback being received during an interview by the miserable fuck who didn't know when to ignore a recruiter: me.

To round all this out be to be back on topic: Thank you @joel_mckay for that "staffing agency lead generation firm" line. That helps me to realize what I've been coming to suspect is true: These aren't actually recruiters hired by firms. They're people scouring Linkedin for anyone who's a) breathing and b) has some overlapping words, for a job post the "recruiter" probably also found on Linkedin.

Joel_Mckay2• 2 years ago

There are specialty agencies for engineers like aerotek.com that will help with international placements. I'm unaffiliated with the firm, but they were legitimate at one time.

Note your PE ticket is regional, and will constrain where you can be employed in such roles. Fine if you drop anchor in a city works-yard or utility, but not really a lot of vertical movement in such roles.

Journeyman/Journey-person certification is usually quicker, and with a practical factory background will keep you busy.

Note in some regions the requirements for either cert path can vary a lot.

Best of luck =)

Mountain_Skies• 2 years ago

This is fraud. Make it a felony, have a couple of high-profile convictions, and the problem will disappear. It happens because it's zero risk and low cost on one side, and the resources expended on the candidate side is of no concern to those committing the fraud. Attach real actual jail time to the fraud and the value proposition completely changes.

dlevine2• 2 years ago

A relative of mine works for a large tech company. Her manager has 2 open reqs on the team. However, he has been told that he can’t hire anyone in California or New York. This is not to say that there are no qualified candidates elsewhere, but there are a ton of qualified candidates in the Bay Area that he can’t hire. He will probably eventually fill the roles, but it will take a lot longer.

throwaway59592• 2 years ago

Why not CA or NY?

FridgeSeal• 2 years ago

Non-American here: do those states happen to have better employee protections by any chance?

al_borland7• 2 years ago

It could be due to pay. Some companies adjust pay based on where people live, adjusted for COL. CA and NY tend to be on the high end. Just one possible theory, there could be many other reasons.

dlevine2• 2 years ago

These are the most expensive job markets and the company is trying to reduce labor costs.

mianos2• 2 years ago

Maybe they all have an interview process like that post here yesterday on Canonical or Google, where people do ten interviews, each one trying harder and hard to avoid employing a perfectly qualified application so they can inflate their self worth?

worldwidelies• 2 years ago

I worked at a large company. My manager told me there's a legal requirement to post jobs publicly even though the position was intended for internal hiring. I don't know how true this is. If it is true, this could explain some of the 'ghost jobs'.

al_borland7• 2 years ago

I’ve heard of this before as well. I’ve actually looked at applying for some internal jobs and was told not to bother, because it was the posting for a certain person.

Had it happen for me once as well. A new team was being formed that I was part of. I was given a certain job post ID to apply for that was meant for me. Some people got upset, because they were told to apply for a level 2 position, when they saw a level 3 or 4 position was also out there that they wanted to go for… but the decisions had already been made.

ghaff4• 2 years ago

Years after the fact, I was curious if a job opening created for me when a higher-up wanted to bring me in was posted for a bit. If so, other people probably didn't have much of a chance. Although I had some interviews, I don't think I ever even applied to the job through the online system.

ergocoder• 2 years ago

Company's website is rife with ghost jobs.

I worked in one where there was a layoff and hiring freeze. Yet the website contains hundreds of open positions.

stefanos82• 2 years ago

Without knowing anything about economics or how they work, what crosses my mind and that is just a hypothesis, yet a plausible scenario, is that companies do this to maintain their financial validity due to current market turbulence of uncertainty...because if you think about it, if they don't show they are hiring, they will give the impression of stagnation, thus the loss of their current market value; but if they show they are hiring, without the outsiders knowing they are actually do not, it gives the false impression of company's growth, thus reassuring investors' financial concerns.

I hope I'm very wrong, but I have my doubts...

SavageBeast• 2 years ago

I see a good number of what are obviously copied reqs and some that are just so ridiculous that they can't be real (lottery winning salary etc, remote work, C-level title, etc). 2 basic explanations here, maybe 3.

If you wanted to start a recruiting operation you'd start with no job reqs and no customer firms most likely. You're going to need some of those. One way to get them would be to source a pool of resumes, talk to some candidates, sell them on your fake portfolio of reqs etc. NOW you got a pool of quality resumes and some candidates you can pump and you start making calls and sending emails to companies requesting they sign your payment agreement for access to all the awesome candidates in your pool.

Alternatively, if you work a W2 job in HR/corporate recruiting, you have metrics and a schedule of work like anyone else. The metaphorical left arm of corporate and the equivalent right arm are not aware of each others existence and operation in this setting. You get job reqs in a system and you post them. Are they approved for hire? Are they Hopes and Dreams from department managers? Are they vetted internally to be real at all? Who knows. All the person positing knows is that they're getting paid to be at work, be a recruiter, and source people. They post these reqs and keep cashing paychecks. This is normal.

Still yet, there are advertised govt. positions for state agencies. Recruiters often just take these reqs unaltered from the state entity and post them as if they're repping them. They're not most likely but they may have some broader agreement with a state organization for payment so they post them anyhow. This is free inventory for recruiters and any add they place, anyone they talk to, any resume they get .. thats a fish in the boat for free. Of course this happens.

In my own pursuits I have a set of rules I rate reqs by. Being able to get someone on the phone is important. If you're real, you can hop on a call and you in fact want to. When I do talk to someone they shouldn't be asking me for SSN or other IDs either, because they want to "submit" you right away, thus binding the company they submit your info to for payment in the event of your hire. This is a game in itself because you are forever burned to come into this company again either on your own or via a higher quality recruiter. DO NOT EVER FALL FOR THIS. Another one is you'd better speak English as well as I do (I'm in the US) and if you don't you're an offshore resume mill and I want none of what you're doing. All sorts of dirty recruiting tricks once you really get into this.

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Job boards are still rife with 'ghost jobs'. What's the point?

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