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)
Education roles are also an indication of mandatory listing: they have someone internally in mind for a future vacancy but are legally required to list it.
It's the case for most government jobs (which in the US most education roles are for government institutions--whether it be traditional K-12 schools or universities). The law in most states and at the federal level require opening jobs to the general public to prevent favoritism, encourage diversity, discourage corruption, etc. It usually just results in having a job posting that is filled before it's posted as they will have an internal candidate, and the rest is for show
Source of truth from this one is I've worked in public higher ed in two states in the US and gone through this process personally
My partner is a teacher in rural Canada and this is true here, at least. District admins often design a role with someone in mind, setting very specific requirements to that effect (needs to have shop AND socials training/experience is one that comes to mind). They need to post the job to meet union criteria, but only one person could realistically fit the bill.
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.
The job market should be just that, a market, between buyers and sellers, not people who pretend to be buying in order to look like they've got money.
I know this analogy breaks down a little bit since this behavior does actually happen, sort of, in real life p2p markets but the point is, it sucks and if you've ever sold anything on fb marketplace you know how obnoxious it is dealing with people who demand a lot of you but do not intend to actually commit to buying what you're selling.
Investors for one. If these are larger companies, they will often inflate their actual hiring numbers to make it look like they are anticipating more growth than they are actually expecting.
But I certainly feel ripped off applying for jobs they never intended on filling. If they put up a lot of hoops to jump through to apply (submit a portfolio, set up an account, write a cover letter specific to our company), times that by the 1000 people who have applied, and it's an exorbitant amount of human time getting wasted.
The consistent reports I'm getting through friends who have spoken to recruiters is just that standards have increased dramatically. Firms accepting only a single candidate CV from a recruiter instead of 5 or more, and the recruiter downstream working their ass off to ensure it is absolutely the best possible CV, because if it's not then they don't get paid.
Firms accepting only a single candidate CV from a recruiter instead of 5 or more
Why though? I've done hiring before - it takes less than 30 seconds to skim a resume. The recruiters also have no idea what the responsibility is for the jobs they are hiring for - it's a terrible place to bottleneck candidates on.
It sounds like everyone, including recruiters, are being sent on a snipe hunt.
Hiring has been crazy for years. It's worse with remote jobs because you get a firehose of applicants everywhere.
When I was doing a lot of hiring I tried to be as responsive as possible because you don't want to lose the best candidates. I would try to review applicants as fast as they came in. You have to understand that in that hour I might get 40 resumes. 1 or 2 are amazing, another 2-3 could be worth a look, and another 5 might have made the cut if I didn't just read those 2-5 much better resumes ahead of them.
If you met the listing qualifications but got rejected as not qualified, I would double check that your resume wasn't unclear about something. You would not believe how many times I've interviewed candidates who had some key experience that they forgot to include on the resume and didn't realize it was missing until it spontaneously came up in talking to them.
The simpler explanation is that a tired hiring manager was just clicking buttons to dismiss applicants who didn't make the cut.
There are also a lot of reposts coming from recruiting companies.
I see a position getting posted for a local company, and within hours the same requirements are showing up for 10 new postings with vague company names like "... is wanted for a local manufacturer" etc.
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.
It would be genuinely shocking to me if someone came up with evidence that the majority of jobs on job sites were made by companies that actually intended to hire the best candidate that applied through that site!
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.
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.
Not necessarily indicates any 1 thing; it can be fake job posts to signal growth, could be an extra picky hiring manager, even a decrepit company that forgot to close it.
I agree with that, just responding to the parent who wrote that their company keeps the hiring listed. So, in their case it's true but in other cases it is not.
I agree, I should have written a bit more, apologies.
No, the exact opposite! A high percentage of ghost jobs indicates that there are very few actual jobs open in the field, which suggests an oversupply of workers.
So you should apply to old job postings? Consensus in LATAM seems to be, they just forgot to take them down and they already have someone or in Latin America if you repost the same opening over and over the consensus seems to be the company is toxic they have a turnover problem, maybe you should say outright you're looking for 10 people
Yes. I recently got a job (IT infrastructure engineer with a non-tech company) on a posting that was 6 months old. they had filled it, and at the same time got approval for a second headcount so they never pulled it down
Some common sense goes a long way. If the job listing is from a company with 10,000 people, you can assume that they're always hiring. Submit away.
If the listing is generic like "senior software engineer" and all of the requirements are generic like being able to program or do teamwork, it's probably a generic listing.
Applying anyway is a safe bet, but I wouldn't invest as much energy into tailoring your resume if it's a 6 month old posting from a 50 person company with a website that looks like it's from 2009. That company probably forgot to take the listing down.
maybe you should say outright you're looking for 10 people
This wouldn't help because you have no way of knowing if they've already hired 9 people or 1 person.
The target can also change constantly. At a large enough company you continuously lose people for natural reasons, like retirement, moving for a spouse, moving to be closer to family. Past a tipping point you're just always hiring.
Often you pay to have that posting. For a smaller company they def know that posting is still up. Likely they are just getting poor applications (or need to improve their posting because the right people are not seeing it)
In the age of LLMs every one is "tailoring" their resume to every posting.
At a large enough company you continuously lose people for natural reasons, like retirement, moving for a spouse, moving to be closer to family. Past a tipping point you're just always hiring.
As an analogy it's kinda like hard drives: when one of my hard drives dies, it's An Event which I need to deal with specifically; I need to order a replacement for that specific drive. At Google's server farms, hard drives dying is just a statistic, you continuously buy hard drives just because you know existing drives are gonna die at some semi-predictable rate.
No this is not common sense. No company in LATAM has 10000 people. Large companies just aren't a thing here. Most companies here are the 50 people companies you mention so the normal thing is to hire occasionally. And LATAM never had an industrial revolution so software positions are just rare unless the company is larger than the local average. If you do find one, it's not a pure one.
You can, but you’re probably wrong and are wasting your time and effort going through lord knows how many hoops to submit a simple CV.
Were submissions as simple as “here’s my CV, contact me if you like what you see”, then this wouldn’t be a problem. But when you have to sign up to the millionth HR service with the same 50 “please input the info that’s already on the resume you’re submitting” steps over and over again just to never hear back from the company or get rejected 6 months later, “submit away” is not an acceptable answer.
This wouldn't help because you have no way of knowing if they've already hired 9 people or 1 person.
Yes, it would. Even if only 1 of the 10 spots is available, it still is a valid listing. Not knowing if the listing is valid at all is way worse.
Asking for “common sense” only works if the situation you are in makes sense to begin with. Job listings are a cesspit of bad behaviour, dark patterns, disrespectful processes and incongruous offers.
What we need is some sort of regulation on how job listings are posted and how candidates can and should apply.
I think people just latch onto ideas that try to simplify and make sense of frustrating situations where they dont have control. "Ghost jobs" are thing to blame now, for a while is was that taxcode thing for software engineers.
I see this for experienced roles too, especially where pay isn't super competitive. If you need a lead software engineer in a certain city for a certain salary, that often means waiting months for them to come across it. 10 junior engineers may apply but ultimately they just can't perform the role required
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.
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 seems relatively quick.
Remember that the average job candidate is absolutely clueless about how positions are created and filled in real life, so seeing bad assumptions like “most positions are filled in under ninety days” shouldn’t be surprising.
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.
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.
(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)
Education roles are also an indication of mandatory listing: they have someone internally in mind for a future vacancy but are legally required to list it.
Any citations are welcome on this for my source of truth knowledge graph. Thank you in advance.
It's the case for most government jobs (which in the US most education roles are for government institutions--whether it be traditional K-12 schools or universities). The law in most states and at the federal level require opening jobs to the general public to prevent favoritism, encourage diversity, discourage corruption, etc. It usually just results in having a job posting that is filled before it's posted as they will have an internal candidate, and the rest is for show
Source of truth from this one is I've worked in public higher ed in two states in the US and gone through this process personally
My partner is a teacher in rural Canada and this is true here, at least. District admins often design a role with someone in mind, setting very specific requirements to that effect (needs to have shop AND socials training/experience is one that comes to mind). They need to post the job to meet union criteria, but only one person could realistically fit the bill.
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.
Sounds super annoying sorry it sucks but who exactly are they defrauding in your view? And what numbers are they gaming?
The job market should be just that, a market, between buyers and sellers, not people who pretend to be buying in order to look like they've got money.
I know this analogy breaks down a little bit since this behavior does actually happen, sort of, in real life p2p markets but the point is, it sucks and if you've ever sold anything on fb marketplace you know how obnoxious it is dealing with people who demand a lot of you but do not intend to actually commit to buying what you're selling.
Investors for one. If these are larger companies, they will often inflate their actual hiring numbers to make it look like they are anticipating more growth than they are actually expecting.
But I certainly feel ripped off applying for jobs they never intended on filling. If they put up a lot of hoops to jump through to apply (submit a portfolio, set up an account, write a cover letter specific to our company), times that by the 1000 people who have applied, and it's an exorbitant amount of human time getting wasted.
The consistent reports I'm getting through friends who have spoken to recruiters is just that standards have increased dramatically. Firms accepting only a single candidate CV from a recruiter instead of 5 or more, and the recruiter downstream working their ass off to ensure it is absolutely the best possible CV, because if it's not then they don't get paid.
Why though? I've done hiring before - it takes less than 30 seconds to skim a resume. The recruiters also have no idea what the responsibility is for the jobs they are hiring for - it's a terrible place to bottleneck candidates on.
It sounds like everyone, including recruiters, are being sent on a snipe hunt.
Hiring has been crazy for years. It's worse with remote jobs because you get a firehose of applicants everywhere.
When I was doing a lot of hiring I tried to be as responsive as possible because you don't want to lose the best candidates. I would try to review applicants as fast as they came in. You have to understand that in that hour I might get 40 resumes. 1 or 2 are amazing, another 2-3 could be worth a look, and another 5 might have made the cut if I didn't just read those 2-5 much better resumes ahead of them.
If you met the listing qualifications but got rejected as not qualified, I would double check that your resume wasn't unclear about something. You would not believe how many times I've interviewed candidates who had some key experience that they forgot to include on the resume and didn't realize it was missing until it spontaneously came up in talking to them.
The simpler explanation is that a tired hiring manager was just clicking buttons to dismiss applicants who didn't make the cut.
There are also a lot of reposts coming from recruiting companies.
I see a position getting posted for a local company, and within hours the same requirements are showing up for 10 new postings with vague company names like "... is wanted for a local manufacturer" etc.
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.
Sometimes that can happen but it is not common, certainly not a large % of job posts.
Do you have a source on that?
It would be genuinely shocking to me if someone came up with evidence that the majority of jobs on job sites were made by companies that actually intended to hire the best candidate that applied through that site!
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.
What country is it?
China
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
Historically the ad was in a newspaper and you would sit and circle them with your breakfast while listening to the wireless.
Companies didnt pay to put the ad in the paper every day once the vacancy was filled.
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.
That's fair but still indicates shortage, no?
Not necessarily indicates any 1 thing; it can be fake job posts to signal growth, could be an extra picky hiring manager, even a decrepit company that forgot to close it.
I agree with that, just responding to the parent who wrote that their company keeps the hiring listed. So, in their case it's true but in other cases it is not.
I agree, I should have written a bit more, apologies.
It’s a pipeline requisition or feeder requisition. Sometimes companies will close and refresh it. Can’t rely on job listings alone
No, the exact opposite! A high percentage of ghost jobs indicates that there are very few actual jobs open in the field, which suggests an oversupply of workers.
So you should apply to old job postings? Consensus in LATAM seems to be, they just forgot to take them down and they already have someone or in Latin America if you repost the same opening over and over the consensus seems to be the company is toxic they have a turnover problem, maybe you should say outright you're looking for 10 people
Yes. I recently got a job (IT infrastructure engineer with a non-tech company) on a posting that was 6 months old. they had filled it, and at the same time got approval for a second headcount so they never pulled it down
Some common sense goes a long way. If the job listing is from a company with 10,000 people, you can assume that they're always hiring. Submit away.
If the listing is generic like "senior software engineer" and all of the requirements are generic like being able to program or do teamwork, it's probably a generic listing.
Applying anyway is a safe bet, but I wouldn't invest as much energy into tailoring your resume if it's a 6 month old posting from a 50 person company with a website that looks like it's from 2009. That company probably forgot to take the listing down.
This wouldn't help because you have no way of knowing if they've already hired 9 people or 1 person.
The target can also change constantly. At a large enough company you continuously lose people for natural reasons, like retirement, moving for a spouse, moving to be closer to family. Past a tipping point you're just always hiring.
Often you pay to have that posting. For a smaller company they def know that posting is still up. Likely they are just getting poor applications (or need to improve their posting because the right people are not seeing it)
In the age of LLMs every one is "tailoring" their resume to every posting.
This depends a ton on if we're talking about a company's own website's job listings or if it's on some dedicated job listing site.
As an analogy it's kinda like hard drives: when one of my hard drives dies, it's An Event which I need to deal with specifically; I need to order a replacement for that specific drive. At Google's server farms, hard drives dying is just a statistic, you continuously buy hard drives just because you know existing drives are gonna die at some semi-predictable rate.
No this is not common sense. No company in LATAM has 10000 people. Large companies just aren't a thing here. Most companies here are the 50 people companies you mention so the normal thing is to hire occasionally. And LATAM never had an industrial revolution so software positions are just rare unless the company is larger than the local average. If you do find one, it's not a pure one.
I googled and literally the first result was LATAM Airlines who have 44,000 employees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LATAM_Airlines
Petrobras?
You can, but you’re probably wrong and are wasting your time and effort going through lord knows how many hoops to submit a simple CV.
Were submissions as simple as “here’s my CV, contact me if you like what you see”, then this wouldn’t be a problem. But when you have to sign up to the millionth HR service with the same 50 “please input the info that’s already on the resume you’re submitting” steps over and over again just to never hear back from the company or get rejected 6 months later, “submit away” is not an acceptable answer.
Yes, it would. Even if only 1 of the 10 spots is available, it still is a valid listing. Not knowing if the listing is valid at all is way worse.
Asking for “common sense” only works if the situation you are in makes sense to begin with. Job listings are a cesspit of bad behaviour, dark patterns, disrespectful processes and incongruous offers.
What we need is some sort of regulation on how job listings are posted and how candidates can and should apply.
This kind of attitude is why some people cant find jobs. Meanwhile the ones who just emailed their cv and didnt overthink it are happily working.
I think people just latch onto ideas that try to simplify and make sense of frustrating situations where they dont have control. "Ghost jobs" are thing to blame now, for a while is was that taxcode thing for software engineers.
I see this for experienced roles too, especially where pay isn't super competitive. If you need a lead software engineer in a certain city for a certain salary, that often means waiting months for them to come across it. 10 junior engineers may apply but ultimately they just can't perform the role required
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.
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 seems relatively quick.
Remember that the average job candidate is absolutely clueless about how positions are created and filled in real life, so seeing bad assumptions like “most positions are filled in under ninety days” shouldn’t be surprising.
[delayed]
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.