A Problem That Never Seem to End: Jobs That Get Posted That Never Get Filled

HERE’S A WELL KNOWN hiring practice that is as stupid and shortsighted today as it was when I first encountered it nearly 30 years ago.

It popped up — again — in a BBC story this past week titled The “ghost jobs” employers never fill.

As the BBC described it:

“Job boards like LinkedIn and Indeed continue to advertise open positions, and workers are actively submitting applications. Yet despite an influx of highly qualified candidates, plenty of desirable job adverts have languished on digital platforms with an increasingly common label: ‘Posted 30+ days ago.’

While the listings may be old, job seekers generally still assume companies are actively hiring for the roles. The truth is more complicated. Some of these are simply not-yet-removed ads for jobs that have been filled, but some were never meant to be filled at all. (emphasis added)

These are ‘ghost jobs,’ and they’re becoming an increasingly common – and problematic – obstacle for job seekers.”

Are ‘Ghost Jobs’ an innocent oversight?

IT ALWAYS RAISES a logical question — why would an organization ever want to post jobs that they never intend to fill?

A story on Marketplace.com explains it like this:

“Ghost jobs can be an innocent oversight: A recruiter puts up open positions and gets laid off or forgets to take them down once they’re filled. But sometimes employers post ghost jobs on purpose so that to investors it looks like the company is growing, and to overworked and frustrated employees it looks like help is on the way. 

But the most common type of ghost job is talent hoarding.

‘You keep postings out there. You collect a large pool of resumes. You may, in fact, make contact with candidates and interview them, just so you have a large pool of talent,’ Dan Kaplan, a senior partner at consulting firm Korn Ferry, an HR consulting firm. ‘But you don’t plan on actually filling the job anytime soon or hiring.’

Indeed says this process is not a scam and that there are a number of reasons for organizations going the ghost job route.

The Wall Street Journal made the point that,

“Some job ads have little correlation to actual job availability because companies require that all jobs be posted, even if a candidate has been predetermined. In other instances, especially at larger companies, poor coordination is to blame, says Elliott Garlock, founder of Stella Talent Partners, a Boston-based recruiting firm.

During a previous stint working on talent strategy at Wayfair, Inc., Mr. Garlock says, the online retailer frequently advertised jobs that it wasn’t actually hiring for. Plans and budgets were constantly changing, and so many teams were involved in the hiring process that it was hard to ensure job postings stayed up-to-date.

“It’s not because we were ill-intentioned and out to trick the candidate market,’ he says.”

A bad candidate experience and the fire hose effect

HERE’S MY TAKE: I know a lot of recruiters and hiring managers. If you asked them about “ghost jobs” they would probably tell you that while they don’t like them, they are necessary in order to have candidates on hand for whenever positions open up.

I can see the logic in that, and it makes sense at some level, but it’s mostly a load of crap.

Life is hard for job candidates, and that’s because most organizations aren’t terribly transparent about their hiring process. It’s means that job seekers get left to wonder where they stand with a job they have applied for, and in a great many cases, never get much of a response if they get any response at all.

How do I know this? It’s because I’ve been looking for a job for 10 months now and can count the number of automated responses I’ve gotten on the fingers of one hand. By the way, I haven’t gotten anything that would qualify as a personal response during that time frame.

Good thing I’m at the tail end of my working life, but it’s still a terrible candidate experience and I know there are many others who feel the same way.

And, I have encountered various versions of this while job hunting over the life of my career. It was actually better before the Internet when you had to put together a resume, cover letter, and work samples to be mailed to someone somewhere.

Hiring managers got your packet and felt compelled to respond in writing, or by phone if they were really interested in you. The number of people responding was manageable because applying for a job was a lot of work and took time to do back then.

Today, recruiters and hiring managers are overwhelmed by the volume of responses they get online — the “fire hose effect” — where the flood of resumes from a postings on a job board, company website, or LinkedIn is akin to trying to take a drink of water from a fire hose.

In other words, you get a lot more candidates coming your way in our high tech world of hiring here in the 21st Century, and although you get a lot of volume when you post a job, it’s harder for both candidate AND hiring manager to handle.

Yes, they’re hiring … but not anytime soon

ONE LAST THOUGHT: Years ago I worked for a guy who owned a magazine company that specialized in pet and animal publications. He absolutely loved to post “ghost jobs” to take the temperature of the market and see how low he could go in what he had to pay people.

He was cheap, shortsighted, and abusive to people both looking for a job and currently in his employ, and guess what? He absolutely hated the rise of the Internet because it made it harder to be cheap because so many applicants came his way and fouled up his ability to find people who would play his game.

The Wall Street Journal story about ghost jobs — titled Job Listings Abound, but Many Are Fake — is about a year old but seems to be even more relevant today than when it was first published in March of 2023.

This quote from a job seeker seems to say that best:

“Given the uncertain economic outlook, some job ads may be more wishful thinking than anything else, says Vincent Babcock, a Nashville, Tenn.-based recruiter. Such a strategy, he says, risks turning off applicants who may view the ads as misleading.

‘They’re posting jobs with the intention of hiring, but not anytime soon,’ “

Good luck to anyone looking for a job. As for me, well, I doubt I will find one, but perhaps I will get lucky one last time and have somebody find me. I’m pretty easy to find, so who knows?

I still have faith, but I’m not holding my breath.

Other trends and insights …

And if you need your weekly fix of AI news … 

• As AI Expands, Public Trust Seems To Be Falling (From Forbes.com)
• How to Decide if AI Should be Part of Your Growth Strategy (From HBR.org)
• The One Key AI Metric That China Pulls Ahead of the U.S. — Talent (From NYTimes.com)
• AI and the Workforce: How Gen AI Can Help Employees Flourish (From Knowledge at Wharton)
• Many Gen Z Workers Say They Get Better Career Advice from ChatGPT than from their Manager (From LinkedIn.com)
• How People Are Really Using GenAI (From HBR.org)
• Generative AI’s privacy problem (From Axios.com)
• IBM’s CHRO believes AI could be the only solution to a global labor shortage (From HRBrew.com)
• Microsoft pays $650 million for Inflection AI’s staff (From MSPoweruser.com)
• “Journalists are feeding the AI hype machine” (From BBC.com/news)

ALSO: I have never subscribed to Inc. magazine, and I don’t know why because I seems to have subscribed to a lot of others that I read a lot less. Here’s another good workplace story from Inc. that’s well worth a read — How to Tell If Someone Is a Brilliant Jerk in 5 Minutes or Less. The subhead adds, “Filter the brilliant jerks out of your organization before they destroy your company culture.”

ALSO-ALSO: I don’t understand people who demand that their company take a stand on the latest social agenda they’re interested in, but as blow-ups at places like Disney have shown, it can have a terrible impact if customers don’t agree. That’s why this story in Fortune‘s CHRO Daily Newsletter is pretty scary — Over a third of American workers would consider quitting if their CEO’s politics don’t align with their own.