True but there is also a massive proliferation of ghost jobs. Dirty secret for a bunch of Series A places
- really wants to hire H1B, but needs to pretend to interview first for compliance. These usually have absurd requirements to make it viable to reject anyone.
- really wants to do an internal or referral hire or promotion, but needs to interview for HR compliance. These usually have such specific requirements that only the person they want qualifies.
- posts jobs because a company wants to look like its growing, even when it's not.
- posts jobs to either signal to an employee that they are replaceable, or to try and relieve a stressed employee that more help is coming. Either way, it's a bluff
- yes, sometimes you want to hold out for the perfect unicorn and are not in any way in a rush to find them. There's no distinction for this, but job posts are cheap so why not?
- outdated posts that still stay up because There's no rush to take it down.
- a technique used to lower compensation. They post a job, see how many applications it gets. If it's more than enough, they take it down (with no interviews) then put it up once more at a lower rate. Repeat until not enough people apply. This may or may not lead to interviews because the actual goal is market probing.
-purely to advertise the company instead of actually hire. Usually done at career fairs where you talk and realize there's no actual open positions.
Can also happen when it takes 3 months to get a job posting approved, so once you get one you just leave it up.
The comp technique you mentioned though seems like a lot of work for price discovery, surely there are data sets out there?
> Moral hazard is when one party takes actions that impose costs on others because they don’t fully bear those costs themselves. With ghost jobs, employers get benefits (brand signaling, resume mining, internal optics) while job seekers eat the time, emotional, and sometimes financial cost of chasing something that never really existed.
There's a IT careers site that was sold, I believe, went through a re-branding. And now they also offer AI and "personal" resume reviews _and_ writing, cover letters, and they even have members do a 10-15 minute AI virtual interview that ostensibly could be shown to a hiring manager.
I was unemployed as a PM for about three month. I applied to in the order of 100 roles at this site, as well as applications on the other sites you'd expect, from LI to more niche.
I felt that this site was "underperforming". Jobs I'd applied to that I'd only really seen on there I'd never heard from. I saw jobs that were advertised in other places on there too.
What sealed it for me was that towards the end of the three months, I got an email from the site. "Your profile has been viewed". I open it, "An employer is looking at your profile". I'd never seen this type of email from them before, and sure enough: "Your profile has been viewed 1 time in the last 90 days". That was it. No contacts, and only one employer has even looked at my profile on the site (and this is the kind of site where that'd be the only place they could look at your application). And that employer didn't even have positions open.
But the site does ask you questions to "submit to the employer" about "why you want to work here" "why you'd make a good fit", etc.
And I'm entirely convinced that the jobs they're advertising are only (a very small) fractionally "real" and ever reviewed by anyone at all (maybe the "promoted" jobs?), and they're harvesting positions and jobs from other sites or employers (there's no positions that don't actually seem to exist, or at least not ads)...
... and that their chief motivation for this is getting all your answers to train their models for their actual revenue generator - AI resume writing, cover letter writing, etc. All pre-seeded with other people's real answers to such questions.
I've applied for many jobs where I was perfectly qualified and got rejection notices immediately. I applied on a Sunday and got rejected on Sunday an hour later. No human reviewed that application I made, it was auto rejected, and if that's the case, what other explanation is there than "ghost jobs."
You didn't pass some arbitrary ruleset given to an AI or machine learning algorithm.
Companies can be very selective now, and usually implement this selectivity fairly stupidly. There also is the problem of being genuinely swamped with bullshit applicants for positions, so the false positive rate is likely quite high at the moment.
I've found it extremely difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff right now. Finding competent people is more difficult than ever, but the sheer number of applicants is at least an order of magnitude higher. Botting has made applying to jobs exceedingly low friction, so there is very little downside to someone entirely not qualified to apply to 600 jobs a day and hope they get lucky.
We have positions that have been open for months that go unfilled simply due to lack of time to sort through applicants, and the few we do have time to interview usually are obviously unqualified within the first 5 minutes of talking to them.
I just have had lots rejections, and some where I did have a good fit, that I don't think "AI auto rejection" is the only story. I have good credentials, several F500 experiences, no big career gaps.
The only real success I have had in the last few years is targeted emails (from who is hiring on HN) or through my network.
It's very different than at any other time and I believe it is a combination of a terrible market, AI rejections, and ghost jobs. And I'm sure there are more than a few ghost jobs.
It also might point to a filtering mismatch of your get a high false positive rate.
Most of the good folks have come in via word of mouth and networks, as they typically do.
For those outstanding positions they are "very nice to haves" but obviously not critical. When the right candidate gets matched we'll jump on the opportunity, but it's not an existential problem for the moment.
This scenario isn't a "fake job," which are more akin to ghost/scam/non-existent openings.