Posted on 06/12/2024 7:41:24 AM PDT by george76
Recruitment professionals and victims of ‘ghost posting’ say the practice hurts everyone, including the companies that create them..
Amid complex hiring processes, a shadow is spreading in the American business world. Companies are using fake online job openings to project an image of growth, keep existing employees motivated, and cultivate a pool of possible future candidates with no intention of hiring, according to research.
The practice is commonly known as “ghost posting” and it accounts for 43 percent of online job openings across multiple industries.
A Clarify Capital survey of more than 1,000 hiring managers showed that, beyond fake growth metrics and productivity drivers, one third of professionals claimed they used ghost posts to placate overworked employees.
The phenomenon has caused universal frustration on both the applicant and hiring side. On average, it can take up to eight weeks for a job seeker to receive an offer after submitting an application online, according to job listing site Indeed. The process often includes resume tailoring, lengthy applications, and multiple rounds of interviews. That means applicants are wasting hours trying to get hired by companies that aren’t actually looking.
Consequently, it’s not surprising that 55 percent of Americans say they’re “completely burned out” from job hunting, according to staffing company Insight Global. Many hiring professionals say ghost posting hurts businesses that are actually trying to recruit new talent. Creating a pre-qualified pool of candidates for future openings is why 37 percent of surveyed hiring managers say they ghost post, but some argue it'll have the opposite effect.
“Ghost job postings are definitely problematic for companies legitimately trying to hire people,” Ben Lamarche, general manager at Lock Search Group, told The Epoch Times. “Not only do these clutter job boards and make it more difficult for candidates to find and apply to genuine job openings, they also cause frustration and mistrust among candidates.”
Working at a recruitment and consulting agency, Mr. Lamarche has witnessed the rise of fake job posts. A former recruiter friend of his confessed to posting “ghost jobs” to impress clients and boost his performance metrics. Mr. Lamarche noted the recruiter didn’t seem concerned about the candidates’ quality or level of interest, he was just looking for contact information.
He’s also seen incidents where professional candidates with perfectly matched skills suddenly face radio silence from hiring managers, only to find the exact job with the same ad posted on repeat every few weeks.
Tech companies, recruiters, and staffing agencies are among the biggest ghost posters, according to Stephen Greet, the CEO of BeamJobs.
“Tech companies are often cited as major users of ghost postings,” he said. “With how fast the industry moves, maintaining a pool of potential candidates ready to go is key. That way if a new project pops up or someone leaves, they’ve already got qualified people to consider.”
Productivity Theater..
The fake job listing trend isn’t limited to applicants with a broad range of expertise. Mr. Lamarche recalled the case of a colleague with a niche skill set who also fell into this trap. The colleague worked with X-ray systems on machines to determine metal fatigue.
“The company scheduled an interview but then ghosted, and the job posting is still up over a year later,” Mr. Lamarche said. “It’s possible that these fake job postings are used for internal purposes, such as keeping the HR department busy or to avoid discrimination liabilities.”
Some evidence supports this claim. A 2023 Visier analysis of 1,000 full-time U.S. employees revealed nearly half spend more than 10 hours per week trying to look busy instead of being productive. Eighty-three percent of respondents admitted to engaging in busy work over the past 12 months. This is something Visier calls “productivity theater.”
The research and analytics group classifies “productivity theater” as when employees prioritize performative work over productive tasks. Visier asserts the purpose of performative work is to “create the appearance of busily generating product and value rather than contributing to meaningful business results.”
Time spent engaging in this practice can add up fast for hiring professionals. One estimate stated companies spend roughly 30 hours over four weeks to recruit a single employee. This figure is much higher for senior positions, which is around 40 hours over a 6-to-8-week stretch.
“During my work consulting with various HR departments, I’ve heard direct accounts from hiring managers admitting to keeping posts published well after positions were filled,” Conor Hughes, an HR consultant, told The Epoch Times. “Just to give the appearance that those companies were continually hiring and growing.”
Mr. Hughes said fake employment listings aren’t limited to big job search websites. Recently, a hiring manager confessed to him they kept the same job openings posted on their company’s career site for nearly eight months with no plans to interview anyone.
“It seems that for some, padding fake metrics and creating a misleading picture of business activity has become more important than supporting legitimate job seekers,” he said. He believes that with so many phantom listings inflating the true number of opportunities, job seekers inevitably become discouraged after investing significant time into dead ends. “This almost certainly elongates search cycles as trust wavers,” Mr. Hughes said, adding, “Busy HR teams also run the risk of wasting valuable resources sifting through unqualified applicants attracted by postings that don’t represent real needs.”
Like Mr. Lamarche, Mr. Hughes also has friends and colleagues who’ve been affected by likely ghost posts.
“I’ve consoled several discouraged peers of mine who spent hours crafting customized applications and resumes, only to have roles vanish without explanation,” he said.
Mr. Greet of BeamJob, also has customers affected by what are likely fake job posts. One client in particular dealt with sudden silence while in the middle of interviewing for a marketing coordinator position.
“He made it to the final round of interviews but then the process abruptly halted with no explanation,” Mr. Greet told The Epoch Times. “When he searched again months later, that same job was still posted online.”
Mr. Greet recalled another incident with a Ph.D holding client who learned that, months after applying for a job that went nowhere, the company never had any intentions to hire for the position.
“From a company perspective, posting jobs that aren’t actually available could cause problems if it floods them with too many applications from people who may not be the right fit. It might make it harder for employers to find candidates that really match what they need. It risks damaging the company’s reputation,” Mr. Greet said.
Only 39 percent of surveyed hiring managers said their posted employment positions were filled, according to a 2023 Clarify Capital survey. Another 27 percent said they simply forgot to take down their ad.
Generally, online job postings stay open for around 30 days, according to Indeed. However, the company noted that despite a job listing being active, there’s a chance the role was already filled and the hiring manager hasn’t changed the post.
Joe Mercurio, project manager for Clarify Capital, wrote in an online statement that to avoid falling into a time vacuum, it’s important to make sure the listing is very recent. “A job that was posted 48 hours ago is more likely to be actively hiring than a job that was posted 3 months ago.”
Workforce intelligence company Revelio Labs observed a “sharp decline” in the number of hires per job post in 2023, “bringing into question whether job postings are a reliable metric for the state of the labor market.”
It also observed that job applicants are reporting “increasing rates of being ghosted by recruiters.”
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the hires-to-job post ratio has been in freefall, Revelio Labs noted. Legitimate labor shortages can cause this problem, but Revelio pointed out that sectors not prone to shortages, like management and finance, are also a part of this downward trend.
It also stated that applicant ghosting has more than doubled in the past five years.
“Companies using legitimate job postings could potentially lose out on qualified applicants if their job listing is buried among fake postings. This could lead to a longer hiring processes and higher recruiting costs,” Mr. Lamarche said.
Bait Advertising..
In the Midwest, another day of frustrated job searching begins for John Marsden.
“Most of my recent experience job seeking is: apply for stuff you’re perfect for and never hear back. Then the job posting is still there months later,” Mr. Marsden, who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym, told The Epoch Times.
Working as a technical writer and editor, Mr. Marsden has been actively looking for new employment for a year due to a drastic change in the work culture at his current job. When asked how many times he’s applied for a job over the past 12 months, Mr. Marsden laughed. “Oh around 200, give or take. And that’s just doing it part time.”
In the early days of his job search, Mr. Marsden said he followed up with many hiring managers who suddenly disappeared in the middle of the interviewing process. “I’ve gotten four rounds [of interviews] deep and then, just nothing,” he said.
Concerned over the lack of communication, Mr. Marsden’s attempts to follow up with hiring managers were mostly met with silence, but a few responded. He said the ones who got back to him offered strange excuses.
“Sometimes they'd come back with stuff like, ‘You don’t have experience on this proprietary software,’ and it’s like, no one does. It’s only available at your company. You knew that when you brought me in for the interview. So why did you reach out in the first place?”
But Mr. Marsden said he’s learned how to spot a ghost post pretty easily these days, which he equates to “bait advertising.” Listings he said job hunters should be wary of include contract gigs advertising “six months plus,” ones that use corporate buzz slogans, or are vague about the job description. Mr. Marsden steers clear of job posts that focus more on selling the business than explaining the position itself. “If there’s three or four paragraphs about the company or slogans like ‘work hard, play hard,’ the answer is nope. Move on.”
Mr. Hughes emphasized that ghost posts can seriously damage applicant morale and make the pursuit of fulfilling employment feel like a “meaningless numbers game with little regard for people’s career goals or time.”
He says that encounters with fake job listings happen across multiple industries and at any company that prioritizes an image of growth over the fair treatment of people.
“No company or department is immune from pressures that might incentivize padding hiring metrics at the expense of job seekers’ experiences. A more transparent, integrity-focused culture is needed across all industries utilizing online recruitment,” Mr. Hughes said.
I think it is to say a company can’t find a US citizen for the job, so they then get to hire another H-1B, instead.
Companies have to show they posted it, and had no success, even when the H-1B was their desire, from Day 1.
My company sold off the factories and product lines I was responsible for, thus eliminating my role about 8 weeks back. I’ve applied to about 25 jobs so far. 2-3 actually told me the job was filled, or I wasn’t right for it. 1 contacted me for a phone screen with HR. All the others have been no contact at all....many of which reposted the same roles within a week or so.
I just keep applying knowing that a lot of them are fake and use them to show my job search activity for my weekly unemployment applications.
In the meantime I’m day trading stocks and making about the same as I did working full time (so far)....though taxes will be a larger % due to the higher rate on short term capital gains. I’m taking most of the profit and rolling it into short term T-Bills (using ETF symbol BIL that pays a monthly dividend) at over 5%. Goal is to replace 1/2 my salary by year end with dividend income...so far have achieved 3% of my goal in 6 weeks.
If Congress wasn’t on the take, H-1Bs would cost companies more than hiring qualified Americans.
Gather round and hear a story from old uncle Frank. A couple of years ago I was looking for a new gig and got a couple of e-mails from recruiters with Cybercoders. They asked if I was interested, and stated that if I WAS interested that I should respond with my resume. I did as they requested, and got no response. I tried calling, no answer, voicemail, no return calls. I e-mailed them, nothing. I called the company and asked to be transferred to them, 5 rings, voicemail. Then I started googling unique phrases from the job listings. And I found that ONE of the jobs was NOT in the Washington state area that I live in, but was in Mexico, and had been closed 2 months prior. The other job really did exist though. I contacted the company that had the opening, and applied and ended up getting the job. When I got there I asked about their relationship with Cybercoders, and they told me that they didn’t HAVE one, and were unsure what I was talking about. I sent them the e-mail that I have received about the job. They said they had never so much as HEARD of them before. I contacted the recruiter from cybercoders and he finally started to respond. I asked who at the company he had talked to and he gave me a name. I went straight to that guy and asked him “Do you know this guy?” He says he doesn’t. The recruiter and I went back and forth for about 2 days with the recruiter assuring me that this was a real job, and that he was representing them, and all of that. Only, I had to go AROUND him to get an interview.
Anyway long story long, I sent him a picture of me standing in their offices in front of a sign with their name on it, and he was shocked. But he never gave up the game. Never admitted that he had found the listing online and “made it his own”. Despite the fact that the guy he says he knows denies ever having heard of him. Finally he asked “Why I was mad”. Why? Because you never submitted my resume! I got this job on my own!
Companies play all kind of games.
Friend of mine took a job offer, quit his job and showed up at his new employer. They told him he was in competition with 2 other new hires, all for one position. The other two guys had also quit their jobs also.
It was for a training position and the three of them had to do a presentation showing what their skills were. My friend gave the best presentation and was hired, the other two guys were out of luck. They were paid for a couple of days, so legally they had been hired and fired, but in reality they never actually had a job.
Sounded like lawsuit time to me, but who knows if an attorney would even take the case. All the employer had to say is that the guys didn’t have the skills, etc.
BINGO!
https://www.ft.com/content/6fb1602d-a08b-4a8c-bac0-047b7d64aba5
Good article
I think the answer is for us to go back to individual websites and pages.
This is so true. I feel like I’ve been looking for work over the past year and a half, got a string of 3+ month IT contracts. The repeat job postings become clear over time, the dead silence for perfectly matched jobs, etc. I actually wrote on this topic last week, I’ll repost on FR. A bit of venting. It is discouraging. Personally, I haven’t figured out how to play the current game. I suspect the key is personal networking, who you know.
This is a big problem today, especially companies using Indian “recruiters” to repost and try to get right-to-represent (RTR) for those jobs that they really have zero connection with. I see this especially with state jobs. I work as a project manager, in nearby Carson City, they post a job and I swear within a day or so I’ve had 25-30 emails from “recruiters” asking me to apply via them.
Applying for a job online is a sucker bet. HR Departments who already don’t know what the needs of the hiring manager are in the first place, send it out to an online engine like Workaday who rely on the inside recruiters lack of understanding in the second place, and the hiring engine botches it further with their algorithm in the last place.
I applied for a job online and also had a contact at the company who put my CV right in front of the hiring manager. I ended up with an offer. Same day, I received an auto rejection from the online hiring engine. Evidently, I was both perfect for the job and “not quite the fit they were looking for” all in the same day.
I am also convinced that firms use the online engines to create a layer of protection so that they can have rampant DEI hiring policies. I have too many friends who have applied for jobs online and gotten dinged when they are a perfect fit in the job description.
When I was looking for work a few years ago, it seemed like every company was using an employment management software called Taleo. No matter how I applied on Taleo applications, I never got a response. I remember going into online forms where dozens of people never got a response on these applications and no one ever reported a response. One thing about those job openings is they would be posted again the day after the prior posting closed.
Exactly, many posts are so clearly over specified, just so that there is only one person in the whole world, and obviously Not an US citizen, who can satisfy them!
It has been like that for quite long time.
Jobs are created on the spot when hiring managers meet potential employees who can successfully perform the job…on the spot, in front of them.
What probably happened in 90% of these cases is that HR’s diversity screening software automatically deleted resumes without an adequate number of keywords, but the hiring manager had a friend at another company who introduced a great candidate at a conference - and that individual got hired right away with minimal HR involvement.
Even in my HR-free small business, most employees we hire are people we meet at industry events or through customers. Online job postings are expensive and astoundingly useless at surfacing high-character individuals.
Networking! Networking! Networking!
That’s it. All the online resumes in the world get trashed when Joe in Accounting has a friend he says is good. Social Proof is the whole game - in business and personal relationships. This is hard on introverted techies, who tend to want to hide in the corner and just do work - but that road leads to unemployability.
I got a job simply from giving a presentation at a local Users Group. Recruiters attend the meetings, and one in particular, offered me a job on the spot afterwards.
Sometimes they put job openings up there to try to pull out info out of applicants, because they are having problems.
They do not want to hire anybody, but under the job interview process, they try to get the info from the applicants!
I had a great relationship with the man who owned the contracting company I was working for. I was on assignment as a program manager at a major military contractor. But as an essentially temp worker, I kept scanning the job postings. Then I came across a posting from my employer for a job I was not only qualified for but was essentially doing and getting rave reviews. I phoned him right away. There was an embarrassed bit of hemming and hawing and then he explained that he needed to continually collect resumes in case he got a requirement for such a job as he’d need to submit several qualified candidates right away. Knowing his whole client list and their requirements, I kept an eye on his listings. Most of the time, he had ten or so “Need to fill now” listings when I knew he had zero openings. Now, multiply that by all the headhunters and I’d say the estimate that nearly half of all online job openings are bogus is probably an under count.
If you’re in a no skill job, like clerk or checker, you can literally walk down the street in any city and find work. Yesterday they were breaking in new checkers at the registers in my local ACE. I was chatting with one and she had upgraded to ACE from the local McDonalds the week before. As had the other checkers. The McDonalds is advertising a 15-19 dollar starting pay. Two decades ago, with my own engineering company I couldn’t bill $20 per hour.
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