Ghost Jobs Haunt Online Listings (msn.com) 62
One in five online job postings may be "ghost jobs" that companies never intend to fill, according to new data from hiring platform Greenhouse examining its clients' recruitment patterns in 2024. The analysis found that 18-22% of advertised positions across technology, finance, and healthcare sectors went unfilled, while nearly 70% of companies posted at least one ghost job in the second quarter of 2024.
Construction, arts, food and beverage, and legal industries showed the highest rates of ghost listings. In response, Greenhouse and LinkedIn have introduced verification systems for job postings. LinkedIn reports more than half its listings are now tagged as "verified," indicating confirmed open positions. Companies maintain ghost listings for various reasons, including projecting growth, keeping options open for exceptional candidates, or meeting federal posting requirements, said Jon Stross, Greenhouse's president and co-founder.
Construction, arts, food and beverage, and legal industries showed the highest rates of ghost listings. In response, Greenhouse and LinkedIn have introduced verification systems for job postings. LinkedIn reports more than half its listings are now tagged as "verified," indicating confirmed open positions. Companies maintain ghost listings for various reasons, including projecting growth, keeping options open for exceptional candidates, or meeting federal posting requirements, said Jon Stross, Greenhouse's president and co-founder.
I've worked in the public sector for almost (Score:5, Insightful)
2 decades. They're required by law to post jobs publicly, but in reality they already have someone in mind before they even post 99% of the time. Usually internal, and when not, the nepotism is very very strong.
Re:I've worked in the public sector for almost (Score:5, Insightful)
It is important to realize that no amount of regulation has stopped people from hiring the people they want, regardless of qualifications of either the person they want or the person they won't hire. It literally is there for legal reasons as a "check box" to say "see, we followed procedures" get out of jail free card.
In the end, no changes to how things have always been done, but we end up with more regulation in the mean time.
Re:I've worked in the public sector for almost (Score:5, Informative)
This also applies to the H1B's. Both already having someone in mind (rich parents sent their kid to US university and now they are being placed in H1B spot) and postings because they need to meeting justification requirements.
I see these all over, every specific specialization requirement under the sun. In the past if someone applied who was actually a great fit they might ignore those specifics and hire them but I don't see that anymore. Nope, your cloud experience better be their flavor and using the specific subset of tools they are using, oh and you need to have a devsecops stack, with 5+yrs of experience and all using the same tools as they are for that stack. Even if you find that guy... if everyone is hiring an exact fingerprint then how is that guy supposed to get his next position? I'm seeing the same on the network side... they want people to be specialized on their appliances/solution stack.
Pretty sure the high school dropout CCIE with 20yrs varied/progressive experience is a better choice than the foreign master's student who happened to admin the same web gateways you are deploying at the moment during a 6month internship... but they are hiring the latter rather than the former.
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"Pretty sure the high school dropout CCIE with 20yrs varied/progressive experience is a better choice than the foreign master's student who happened to admin the same web gateways you are deploying at the moment during a 6month internship... but they are hiring the latter rather than the former."
Who can they get for the cheaper salary? The position is mainly to check a box, from the higher management position anyway. They need people in seats doing work so they get them, and get them cheaply.
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Actually from what I've seen they'll hire H1B even if the experienced talent will work for less/work on site/etc.
But the perception is as you say which is why we need a 66% labor tariff for both insourced and outsourced labor in the US. Watch as companies magically rediscover the hundreds of thousands of domestic workers they've been laying off for the past decade and remember that skills which can be mastered in under a year by talented workers don't need to be requirements for hiring when it takes up to y
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All that really has done is changed what reason they are allowed to tell you, which has basically forced them to all say, in more or less the same unhelpful words, "We had many fine candidates. Wish you luck."
They can't give feedback because of legal. If they say the wrong thing in the criticism, then get dinged for not hiring a protected class, whether you meant to or not. So having these requirements, rather than helping, just makes it so we get worse feedback, and companies will just lie to you and the o
Re:I've worked in the public sector for almost (Score:5, Interesting)
They aren't job listings inasmuch as they are listings to hoover up resumes.
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Which is why if you suspect it's a fake job, send your fake CV and a salary requirement 50% higher than what you think they are offering.
Re:I've worked in the public sector for almost (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention that many large IT companies post jobs that they really want fill with an H1-B Visa applicant making just 60% the average starting salary for that position. So, they'll "post" the position online for the legally required amount of time and ignore any applications for it as part of that hiring process. Kinda of a slimy process, but it's legal right now.
Re: I've worked in the public sector for almost (Score:1, Interesting)
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Re: I've worked in the public sector for almost (Score:3, Insightful)
There are plenty of government jobs which are internal promotion only. You can get the low level versions of them from outside, but the higher classes require a reapplication. They are really just raises that you have to jump through hiring hoops to get. Yes, with a whole interview and everything, to determine if you are qualified to make more money.
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Usually being interviewed by people you work with, or for. Very incestuous. You already knew all the "right answers" for the CYA treatment.
If the best experience to be a Whatever-it-is III is being a Whatever-it-is I and II first, and I assure you that it is because otherwise you have to learn all the particulars of the way the job has to be done to appease at least local and state government, and maybe federal too... who do you think is going to be the best-qualified candidate?
All this crying about a "Deep State" is really just a bunch of incompetent people proving that they don't understand what competence looks like.
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Usually being interviewed by people you work with, or for. Very incestuous. You already knew all the "right answers" for the CYA treatment.
You clearly seem to dislike this practice, but internal candidates already knowing the "right answers" is often why internal candidates are ideal for a role. You already know how they fit into the culture, they understand the company and their department, they already have relationships with their colleagues, etc. There are plenty of benefits of getting new blood into your department, but that doesn't change that a candidate having a lot of inside knowledge is one of the largest pros for hiring internally.
Re: I've worked in the public sector for almost (Score:2)
Poor noobs don't know facts.
I've seen the postings, noobs.
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Why is this marked as Troll? I work at a private company, and I'll be interviewing for my promotion within a month or so. I just talked with my boss about it earlier today. I'm already doing the job and the new people who will be reporting to me are technically reporting to my boss but are already part of my team. It really is such a waste of time.
Re:I've worked in the public sector for almost (Score:5, Insightful)
Agree, its a huge problem. Its not always nepotism though, sometimes is just a desire to promote a good employee, but its required that the position be posted outside, even though there is not realistic chance of hiring someone else, AND it would be unfair to the person do earned that promotion.
I think "nepotism" is often suspect in cases where the real issue is the desire to hire a known good person. Many people basically lie on their resumes and some can slip through the interview process. Faking references is also not hard to do. So there is a strong rational motivation to hire someone who is known to be highly productive, either directly by the hiring manager or by someone that manager knows and trusts. The cost of hiring an incompetent, lazy or dishonest worker can be very high due to the long startup time at some jobs, and the difficulty of firing people.
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Re:I've worked in the public sector for almost (Score:4)
Good FP and brings back memories... My first database programming job was for the city I lived in and one of my first tasks was creating a kind of bidding document to justify purchasing certain software for a weird computer they had. The machine was actually a word processor, but it could also boot into CP/M and run the database over there... (But the real point of the entire project was so my boss could destroy the enemy boss of a competing section of the bureaucracy... I didn't find out about that part until years later.)
However my tangent on the story involves fake job postings intended to elicit personal information for future phishing attacks... Like LinkedIn is packed with these years.
Re:I've worked in the public sector for almost (Score:4, Funny)
2 decades. They're required by law to post jobs publicly, but in reality they already have someone in mind before they even post 99% of the time. Usually internal, and when not, the nepotism is very very strong.
I've seen this. A long time ago the CEBAF (Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility) now named Jefferson Labs [wikipedia.org] use to post ridiculously long and super detailed job descriptions that I imagined could only really be filled by one person, who they already had in mind, or no one at all. I once saw the requirement "program in PostScript" -- which I have done. Other times, I wouldn't have been surprised to see, "Must be able to divide by zero." :-)
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Back when door-knocking was literally that, or at least, walking into reception, the government demanded it because their own numbers proved 93% of vacancies weren't advertised. It took me 8 years to realize it really meant, the employer already had someone and I was wasting my time. Nowadays, the government brags about the number of vacancy listings while I saw the same job listed 3 times, or the same job reappear every 6 months (employee churn). A half-intelligent person understands the 5-fold jump in
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in reality they already have someone in mind before they even post 99% of the time. Usually internal, and when not, the nepotism is very very strong.
I just got done talking to my boss about my upcoming "promotion" earlier this afternoon. He needs to post it as a position and then I technically have to interview for it. He will post the position later this month, that was written specifically for me, and I'll definitely be getting the position. They even already did a re-org late last year and the new people who will be added to my team are technically still reporting to him. But I've already been doing 1 on 1s with them and have been doing adjustments t
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Not all public sector locations, that's for sure.I've worked at a major R1 university for 2.5 decades. We're required to post jobs publicly and sometimes have someone in mind, but we tell those people, "You have to beat out all other competition". Sometimes that leads to drama because people feel slighted when passed up for an external hire. We navigate that just as anyone else should.
We would get *wrecked* if my department was found to have made a preferential hire.
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2 decades. They're required by law to post jobs publicly, but in reality they already have someone in mind before they even post 99% of the time. Usually internal, and when not, the nepotism is very very strong.
That is indeed a daft requirement but not the cause of most ghost jobs. It would barely be a drop in the bucket.
Most ghost jobs are either to falsely demonstrate that they cant hire someone locally, ergo justifying outsourcing or some kind of visa abuse (usually it's a job posting with both a low wage and impossible list of requirements) or recruitment companies trying to build a database of candidate and potential client details (yes, they want to know all about your former employers so they can cold ca
in government contracting (Score:5, Interesting)
Sooo, an example:
DoD needs a new widget, they put out a solicitation. 15 companies answer the solicitation, they all need some new employees to do that task, so they all put out job offers on the various media to collect resumes to support this new task.
One company gets picked by the Dod.
All the rest have no new task, so don't need those people that sent their resumes in... those companies will probably keep those resumes just in case another solicitation comes along... for a few months at least, then circular file them and if another solicitation comes along after trashing those resumes, they then will put out new job offers.
Re:in government contracting (Score:4, Informative)
If you get an offer from one of these companies sometimes you can use SAM.gov to figure out which contract the work would be for and also which other companies are also ghost hiring for the same role -- if you really want the work, get as many contingent offers as you can since only one is going to come through.
It used to be that a lot this ghost hiring would occur weeks before the RFP dropped. Now I see companies like BAE ghost hiring following the RFI drop typically months before the RFP and almost a year before an actual offer would be made.
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Sometimes HR would then black ball those people afterwards and claim that those people 'weren't serious'
And they keep rising from the dead (Score:2)
https://f6ffb3fa-34ce-43c1-939d-77e64deb3c0c.atarimworker.io/story/24/... [slashdot.org]
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https://f6ffb3fa-34ce-43c1-939d-77e64deb3c0c.atarimworker.io/story/24/... [slashdot.org]
https://f6ffb3fa-34ce-43c1-939d-77e64deb3c0c.atarimworker.io/story/24/... [slashdot.org]
If Slashdot users made a Zombie movie: "The Dupes! The Dupes just keep coming back! They won't stop!"
Jobs? (Score:5, Funny)
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Yeah, pretty much. (Score:5, Interesting)
It has gotten (way) worse in the last 18 months. The messages I got on career portals aren't just bots, their follow-ups are bots now too, asking to use portal XYZ to apply. I've never send out so many perfect fit applications with so little substantial feedback. Lot's of ghosting and fakery, on top of the usual HR dimwits without a clue about the actual requirements. I managed to score a comparatively decent job, but rarely has it taken so much churn and required so much application and interview skills, despite the fact that I'm an experienced Webdev with a good resume, project track and some neat personal branding including a buzzword compliant tech-blog that is 20+ years old. And last time I was very focused and also wording my CVs around each listing individually.
By and large the economy is shrinking and the lack of a real high-tech culture on top of automation is turning lots of positions and their openings into pure bullsh*t. I don't expect this to improve, it's likely to get worse.
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That and every single fucking company uses Workday or some other variation. You have to create new account with every company just to apply and then answer the same questions over and over. No I'm not a veteran and no I'm not disabled nor have I been in the past.
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This has exploded in healthcare since the pandemic. What happens is these companies and practices post jobs that they have no intention of filling with Americans. They just list them for the requisite amount of time, don't do any followup and don't bother to fill them, or list ridiculous requirements that make no sense. When the job goes unfilled for some period of time, they try to use a foreign work visa to fill it for about 60% of what they would pay an American. A lot of times for about 70% of the compe
They should be prosecuted for fraud by SEC (Score:3)
It's also just shitty...for all the non-ghost jobs, you're reducing the probability of a candidate applying. There's 1 real job 15 miles away, but 20 ghost jobs 1 mile away hinting at superior pay, the candidate will likely hold out. Given there are false advertising facets, there needs to be regulations, at least for publicly traded companies. If you're using it to inch up your stock price, you need to face some fines and public shaming.
Re: They should be prosecuted for fraud by SEC (Score:1)
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Prosecution requires a standard of proof not likely to be found. It's not even clear from the data that the "ghost" jobs are in fact fraudulent. They could be the result of all sorts of other motivations, such as plain old carelessness or wishful thinking. I'm pretty sure those aren't crimes.
Dupe from October of last year (Score:2)
Sounds like a job for DOGE, maybe. (Score:2, Interesting)
Ghost jobs could be advertised to comply with federal law, which requires certain roles to be posted publicly, after an external job candidate has already been presented by a recruiter, or an internal hire has been flagged for promotion.
If federal law is gumming up the works on connecting real people with real jobs then maybe we need some application of government efficiency to have these laws repealed. If this is law then it's not something that the Department of Government Efficiency can advise the White House to act on unilaterally. They can suggest changes to the law for consideration, then POTUS, VPOTUS, etc. can use their influence to lobby for changes, and perhaps look for ways to mitigate this issue within the confines of the law
Bad for workers, good for non-workers (Score:3)
Make it cost to post (Score:2)
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It already costs money to post jobs on most job boards.
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I expect if job boards/recruiting companies asked for substantially more money than the competition, they'd go out of business eventually. An alternative idea might be to post statistics with job postings or company profiles: age of this job's postings, percentage of job postings from this employer getting filled, maybe even number of candidates submitted by this recruiter for that job to that employer. Compare those to industry-wide stats. No costs involved, but could still be punitive to non-serious emplo
and then (Score:2)
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businesses have the gall to complain when perspective hires ghost them :D
*prospective
How do they know these are truly ghost postings? (Score:3)
If 20% of the job postings are left unfilled, some but not all will be ghost positions with no true intentions of being filled. There are plenty of other reasons for not filling positions. Maybe they couldn't find the people they wanted. Maybe they found people but either the offer was bad or the negotiations didn't work out. Maybe there was too much competition from other companies for that specific type of position. Maybe there were people that could have been found, but they never got matched up.
It's not reasonable to assume that the only reason for not filling a job was a bad intention of never wanting to fill the position.
How much is down to lack of talent? (Score:2)
From memory, at least 50% of the CVs were rejected due to technical verb diarrhea, the kind where every version and variant of HTML, and CSS is listed. Another 20% were rejected due to errors, or stupidity. For instance, why did you link me to
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Or unrealistic expectations?
"We're looking for a senior full-stack engineer, and we'll pay up to $70K." Yeah, right, good luck with that.
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I don't need a list of every technology you've heard of
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Yeah no doubt. My response was in no way meant to disagree with you!
Thankfully, at my company, we have a fantastic recruiting team, so by the time resumes get to me (the hiring manager), they are well-qualified, and I have to choose between excellent candidates. We don't have a 100% success record, but out of my last dozen hires, only one didn't work out.
When I do have to screen resumes myself, I follow a few simple rules:
1. Is it > 3 pages? Nope. If the candidate can't express their experience concisely
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Blacklisting.. (Score:2)
They should be punished (Score:2)
"Companies maintain ghost listings for various reasons, including" fraud, fraud, fraud, and more fraud. Could they at least under Promissory Estoppel be forced to compensate their victims for damages (wasted time and possibly wasted opportunities)?
Fake It Until You Fuck It Up. (Score:2)
Well, looks like the fake it ‘til you make it crowd needed a bump like Belushi in the narcissist department. Figures those bullshit artists are in charge of job postings. Not sure who owns LinkedIn these days, but a USENET message board is about to become a more viable place to find a job. An actual fucking job. Not some ghost-poop representation of fake success for the sake of appearances.
Don’t assume Greed won’t lie its way right into a full-blown Depression when we just re-define an