Part of me thinks its to see what the competition is doing, see how others are using ai, to train ai, steal ideas/clients (common in the ad/marketing/design) world, train staff to hire, get free consulting.
Some say it’s to raise stock value by fake growth indicators or motivate employees that they are replaceable, but I think those 2 are just partially the case.
>it’s to raise stock value by fake growth indicators
how does that work as a growth indicator, are there any known organizations that track your growth based on how many job postings you do, and then use that data to indicate your growth?
I don't doubt that it could happen, but if it did we would have to know about it, I also don't doubt that I don't know about it, but I would like to know.
Maybe they were, but now? I doubt that every investor or even AI takes job postings with a grain of salt or plainy ignores them and just looks at the numbers of employees.
> Dr Escalera adds that she has also heard examples of companies posting jobs to obtain and sell data.
How is that not illegal? Pretending to offer jobs just to suck in resumes to some database just seems like it should be illegal. Or just like running scams is illegal but they are in another country "so tough luck, you'll never get us"?
America has no data protection law, apart from some hyper-specific ones: healthcare, video rental records. That makes all of this data sharing completely legal. As well as that, it is widely agreed there that lying is free speech.
It is not wire fraud because you do not pay to apply. (In general; places that charge applicants are even more scammy.)
Please stop thinking about laws, and think about enforcement. If the cops don't care about something, it's defecto legal. We have all sorts of fancy laws on the books that aren't enforced. Environmental regs, animal welfare regs, anti trust laws, white collar anti fraud laws. Data laws fall into this bucket. Nobody that would actually enforce those laws gives a dam. We won't be able to solve any of our problems with new laws, until we can actually enforce the laws already on the books
Follow the money, easy payouts for cops and courts is where 95% of enforcement goes. Drug possession is an instant $1000 profit for the local law enforcement, and possibly much more. And if they are poor and challenge it, the extra court fees and court lawyer are also profitable.
Fighting private lawyers is what costs courts money and is why the wealthy get way less criminal punishment.
I was an employment counselor in the late 1990s. Even then, ½ to ¾ of realistic, worthwhile jobs were phantoms.
FF to now and hiring portals silently drop viable applicants for a long list of never disclosed reasons. I know temp agencies that hire, send the employee out on 1 job then never again.
I've never know a time when hiring wasn't crap for entire classes of viable applicants.
How come temp agencies would only send someone out on one job? They make money based on placements so unless that worker has bad feedback from clients it would make sense to place them again.
Talking about "ghost jobs" is like talking about "fake news": everyone that does assumes that only others do, not them. Everyone will somehow always pretend to be "the real thing", even to themselves. It is like misleading propaganda, it will always find a way.
The biggest irony is that the majority of HN's own "Who's Hiring" are ghost jobs.
I won't disappear, it won't even decrease, even with regulation.
I worked in recruiting for a long time and I can tell you I never saw much in the way of any deliberate strategy to create fake job posts.
The thing is that whether or not a job exists at a point in time is far less black and white than you might naively think.
There are many reasons for it to be somewhat grey and banning the practice doesn’t really mean anything because you would have to quantify precisely under what circumstances a job is allowed to be advertised and as I say, it’s not as clear as you might imagine.
There is absolutely not a one to one relationship between a job and a job ad.
My guess is that most of these jobs actually exist, in the sense that if a stellar candidate were to present theirselves, the organization would find a way to hire them.
I know companies that are posting vacancies that currently don't exist in order to keep good candidates on the hook. They tell the candidate that we should keep in touch for when the company is ready to hire them.
I am not sure if it's bad or not. It's true that it kinda wastes the candidate's time. In some cases though, the candidate is so good that the company will create a position just for them.
Can we please get back to using job fairs already? Why are companies so irritatingly resistant to getting back to doing things in-person and real-time?
Even job fairs are useless now. I'm a current student and when I show up a lot of companies seem to just send an intern or 3rd party recruiter out with a bunch of generic company fliers. You can't ask any questions about the job because the recruiter won't know the answer, they don't work in the department or even worse they don't work for the company, and when you find a company you want to join they tell you to apply online anyway. Sometimes you get a special link for applying, which I think is how they differentiate between job fair applications and the others.
At least the few smaller companies that show up seem more immune to this, but they have the problem of wanting to pay an electrical engineer about $50,000-$60,000 for starting pay, which just isn't worth it. So everyone still puts up with the recruiters that know nothing because at least then you have a shot of earning a market rate salary.
I was applying for a while last year. Spending hours to write a cover letter and then either hearing nothing or getting a canned rejection letter is super frustrating. I've come to the conclusion that putting effort into an application is time wasted, so from now on AI is writing pretty much every single one of my cover letters.
Doing that allows me to send out 5 applications in the time it normally takes me to do 1. Since I've seen no actual correlation between effort and success, I figured quantity will give better results than quality. Of course, I might put in actual effort for an opening that I find really interesting, but that's an exception.
Ghost jobs are essentially the 'vaporware' of the HR world. In any other department, misrepresenting your intent to engage in a transaction would be seen as a breach of professional ethics. The fact that it has become a standard KPI for HR departments to 'keep the pipeline warm' at the expense of thousands of hours of unpaid candidate labor is a massive market failure.
How is it different in terms of breach of professional ethics than practice interviews many in tech do, never intending to take the offer? I personally have never done them (part laziness, part ethics, part lucky to have little experience of job insecurity), but have been told a few times by people that do that is stupid that I should stay sharp (and waste 5 people's time to help me for free :))
I see the parallel, but there’s a key difference in intent and scale.
A candidate doing a practice interview is often a defensive reaction to a volatile market—a way to maintain a personal skill. A company posting 'ghost jobs' is a systematic corporate strategy that pollutes market data and wastes thousands of collective hours.
One is an individual trying to survive the system; the other is the system itself failing to act in good faith.
A lot of head hunters will dangle job offers that don’t exist just so they can get info on the company you’re working at - basically they’re trying to keep tab on who’s in charge of hiring, so they can contact them.
There are also those who are paid by your boss just to see if any of their team members is looking to take off.
I don’t think there is anything new here though. These practice have existed for a while, and there’s not much you can do about it.
My first job was in an industry where "ghost jobs" had a different meaning. Local mafia used to add fictitious names to the worker register at work sites, and someone would come and collect the pay in cash every month. The daily work reports would show these workers as engaged in some house-keeping work.
I am not sure if more regulation is a solution, but the lack of respect for job seekers is a real problem.
And not just with ghost jobs. My recent experience as a job seeker was harrowing - even with large, proud companies. I would pass multiple rounds of interviews with senior/director-level interviewers only to never hear back from the company - even after a direct request for an update or feedback. Just total ignorance. Again, this happened with a FAANG+ company.
I got feedback from FAANG+ once after multiple rounds with director / manager etc.
I just got told I didn't seem "motivated" enough despite spending several rounds / days / hours interviewing and bunch of leetcode questions. Not even that I wasn't skilled or good enough or didn't pass the questions. Pretty sure the last guy just didn't like me for whatever reason.
Definitely one of the As in the FAANG. In fact both the As have terrible recruiting practices. One is a known ghoster and given that you were ghosted after a senior level meeting tells me which one.
If there is regulation, it should be about monopolies in general and not trying to micromanage hiring. Companies behave this way because they are in a position to do so. In a real competitive environment they wouldn’t. Poorly thought through band-aid rules don’t change that, in fact they would almost certainly favour the big monopolies with the worst hiring practices who have big HR departments that can handle and game compliance.
> "Others, we found, were inflating numbers and trying to show their company is growing, even if it's not."
Sounds like a fraud against investors? That could be a way to attack this problem because in the U.S., many issues get turned into laws and regulations protecting shareholders.
>I would pass multiple rounds of interviews with senior/director-level interviewers only to never hear back from the company - even after a direct request for an update or feedback.
That is very disrespectful and reflects badly on that company.
Years ago, there was a job agency advertising an IT banking job in the Caribbean. Every week. For years. Apparently it was just a way for them to harvest CVs. 'Sorry you didn't make the interview for that job, but can I interest you in a role creating TPS reports for a company in Slough?'.
Scummy behaviour. But I guess they got away with it.
In the US a lot of these are pseudo postings for immigration applications. They are technically posting the job, but in pt 3 for on page 72 of a random newspaper in a hope that nobody sees it and applies so they can say “we couldn’t find anyone so we need a visa/green card.”
That’s starting to get cracked down on, but it’s been a mess and a sham for a while.
There's another side to it. Imagine a company has a guy somewhere overseas that they hired, and they worked with him for 5 years, and now they want to bring them to the US because it's more convenient and close to the main team. Can they replace it with a US applicant? Not really, unless US applicant can magically gain 5 years of experience with company's products or processes. But by law they must publish a job posting. So they post a fake job posting which nobody ever except one person could possibly fit, and silently hope nobody sees it (because they are not bad guys, they don't want to mislead anybody, they just not need a random worker, they want a very specific person for a very specific position, and they already have the person). The lawmakers meant well, the company means well, but the result is a mess.
Atleast in Europe there are some basic rules around data collection. In places like India, linkedin is a free for all vacuuming up resume data. I've seen the same jobs on linkedin appear for nearly 4 years with no changes and hundreds of people applying every week.
You cant flag it on linkedin either. I guess LinkedIn's business model likes the fake job postings.
I just don't want to deal with all the bs of applying, and playing nice with recruiters. Either they need me or they don't. I don't want to play games.
I don't have the privilege of having a degree or being well networked, or being a great developer.
It's hard to imagine that it's gotten worse. My employer imploded in the housing collapse. I got to the point I could screen at least 80% of the supposed job ads as bogus. Many were the same fairly generic thing month after month, some were outright scams (apply for something a bit outside my realm but which I could do, soon I was getting people trying to interest me in training for said role), some were the same job being posted in many manifestations. Maybe the original was legit, but 20 versions of it are 1 job, not 20.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 67.8 ms ] threadSome say it’s to raise stock value by fake growth indicators or motivate employees that they are replaceable, but I think those 2 are just partially the case.
how does that work as a growth indicator, are there any known organizations that track your growth based on how many job postings you do, and then use that data to indicate your growth?
I don't doubt that it could happen, but if it did we would have to know about it, I also don't doubt that I don't know about it, but I would like to know.
How is that not illegal? Pretending to offer jobs just to suck in resumes to some database just seems like it should be illegal. Or just like running scams is illegal but they are in another country "so tough luck, you'll never get us"?
It is not wire fraud because you do not pay to apply. (In general; places that charge applicants are even more scammy.)
Fighting private lawyers is what costs courts money and is why the wealthy get way less criminal punishment.
FF to now and hiring portals silently drop viable applicants for a long list of never disclosed reasons. I know temp agencies that hire, send the employee out on 1 job then never again.
I've never know a time when hiring wasn't crap for entire classes of viable applicants.
The biggest irony is that the majority of HN's own "Who's Hiring" are ghost jobs.
I won't disappear, it won't even decrease, even with regulation.
The thing is that whether or not a job exists at a point in time is far less black and white than you might naively think.
There are many reasons for it to be somewhat grey and banning the practice doesn’t really mean anything because you would have to quantify precisely under what circumstances a job is allowed to be advertised and as I say, it’s not as clear as you might imagine.
There is absolutely not a one to one relationship between a job and a job ad.
I am not sure if it's bad or not. It's true that it kinda wastes the candidate's time. In some cases though, the candidate is so good that the company will create a position just for them.
At least the few smaller companies that show up seem more immune to this, but they have the problem of wanting to pay an electrical engineer about $50,000-$60,000 for starting pay, which just isn't worth it. So everyone still puts up with the recruiters that know nothing because at least then you have a shot of earning a market rate salary.
Doing that allows me to send out 5 applications in the time it normally takes me to do 1. Since I've seen no actual correlation between effort and success, I figured quantity will give better results than quality. Of course, I might put in actual effort for an opening that I find really interesting, but that's an exception.
No more requiring the candidate to do 30 minutes of data entry to encode their resumé into your HR system.
Then a ghost job wouldn't really waste much time, since uploading a JSON should take 30 seconds.
There are also those who are paid by your boss just to see if any of their team members is looking to take off.
I don’t think there is anything new here though. These practice have existed for a while, and there’s not much you can do about it.
And not just with ghost jobs. My recent experience as a job seeker was harrowing - even with large, proud companies. I would pass multiple rounds of interviews with senior/director-level interviewers only to never hear back from the company - even after a direct request for an update or feedback. Just total ignorance. Again, this happened with a FAANG+ company.
I just got told I didn't seem "motivated" enough despite spending several rounds / days / hours interviewing and bunch of leetcode questions. Not even that I wasn't skilled or good enough or didn't pass the questions. Pretty sure the last guy just didn't like me for whatever reason.
But if we do create more legislation, make sure it's regulatory capture in a weak disguise but celebrate it with lots of political spin!
This. Imagine the bureaucracy. The cure would be worse than the disease.
Sounds like a fraud against investors? That could be a way to attack this problem because in the U.S., many issues get turned into laws and regulations protecting shareholders.
That is very disrespectful and reflects badly on that company.
Scummy behaviour. But I guess they got away with it.
That’s starting to get cracked down on, but it’s been a mess and a sham for a while.
That thread is just bullshit.
You cant flag it on linkedin either. I guess LinkedIn's business model likes the fake job postings.
But honestly I settled with my unemployment.
I just don't want to deal with all the bs of applying, and playing nice with recruiters. Either they need me or they don't. I don't want to play games.
I don't have the privilege of having a degree or being well networked, or being a great developer.
It's a market. There can't be a job for everyone.