Ghost jobs are wreaking havoc on tech workers

Well I opened the article, near the beginning I saw the text: &quot;81% of recruiters admitted to posting ads for positions that were fake or already filled.&quot;<p>Instantly that felt completely insane to me, my bullshit detector went off the chart, so since they provided a source, I followed up on the source to see the evidence for myself.<p>What do you know, the source is from a &quot;my perfect resume&quot; website that apparently conducted a study on the issue, but they aren&#x27;t providing the details of the study, aren&#x27;t providing a paper , aren&#x27;t providing the methodology or questions asked, aren&#x27;t providing any details whatsoever, the only thing they provide is the &quot;conclusions&quot; of their study.<p>So, apparently because this random website supposedly conducted a study, and they say the result was &quot;81% posted fake jobs&quot;, that makes it true.<p>Hey, I also conducted a study, and 14% posted fake jobs. There, my claim has just as much backing as theirs does.<p>Instantly lost interest in the &quot;study&quot; and the article based on it.

Many companies have policies requiring that all jobs have to be posted both internally and externally before being filled. The intent is to prevent Sam the VP from just slotting his buddy into the job. At the end of the day, Sam the VP is just going to slot his buddy into the job but now you made a whole bunch of people apply for a job that was never available to them.<p>Same thing happens with H1B&#x2F;PERM, except now it&#x27;s the law requiring it rather than company policy. The company already has someone doing the job today, but legally they have to post the job and interview a certain number of candidates to prove there is no US citizen that can do it.<p>Terrible situation for all involved.

I’m not shocked at all. Another issue is recruiters posting fake jobs and asking for references as step one. Soon as I say “I don’t provide references until the last step, and only to the company hiring” they hang up on me

I&#x27;d love to go back to times where it was fine for a candidate not to have a LinkedIn. Currently, regardless of your blog, or your multiple StackOverflow answers, or your GitHub, or your posts on any of the other tech-focused communities, if HR doesn&#x27;t see your LinkedIn, it&#x27;s as if you&#x27;re off-planet.<p>The tech field is centered around skills. You&#x27;re under pressures to keep them sharp and up to date. When you&#x27;re looking for work and you&#x27;re done polishing the resume, updating the blog posts, doing your leetcode drills, do you really want to add playing LinkedIn games to the mix?<p>It seems to me that tech workers would benefit from having <i>really</i> tech-focused job networks. Not these hybrid platforms. LinkedIn, Indeed, and friends. They don&#x27;t particularly care about you as a <i>tech worker</i>. They don&#x27;t even understand you or your skillset. You&#x27;re a backend dev with many years of OOP, FP, Agile, Kanban, Python, Go, SQL, JavaScript, and a slew of other relevant skills for the job, but they&#x27;ll gladly inform you that you&#x27;re missing a few skills to better match the list in the ad: go-getter, team-player, positive-attitude. Ok, sure, whatever...<p>Another thing, seeing an ad that asks for Python, Go, Node.js, SQL, React, Terraform, Kubernetes as an &quot;Intermediate position&quot; just tells me that no one in charge cares.

On this topic, do y&#x27;all think the HN Who&#x27;s Hiring thread has ghost jobs? I know I&#x27;ve applied to one and never had back (a few years ago).

Don’t use LinkedIn or Monster or Indeed. You’re better off searching on Google with “ inurl:careers” and finding positions these companies are directly hiring for.

This wasn&#x27;t thought of when false advertising laws were drafted. California:<p><i>17500. It is unlawful for any person, firm, corporation or association, or any employee thereof with intent directly or indirectly to dispose of real or personal property or to perform services, professional or otherwise, or anything of any nature whatsoever or to induce the public to enter into any obligation relating thereto, to make or disseminate or cause to be made or disseminated before the public in this state, or to make or disseminate or cause to be made or disseminated from this state before the public in any state, in any newspaper or other publication, or any advertising device, or by public outcry or proclamation, or in any other manner or means whatever, including over the Internet, any statement, concerning that real or personal property or those services, professional or otherwise, or concerning any circumstance or matter of fact connected with the proposed performance or disposition thereof, which is untrue or misleading, and which is known, or which by the exercise of reasonable care should be known, to be untrue or misleading, or for any person, firm, or corporation to so make or disseminate or cause to be so made or disseminated any such statement as part of a plan or scheme with the intent not to sell that personal property or those services, professional or otherwise, so advertised at the price stated therein, or as so advertised. Any violation of the provisions of this section is a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding six months, or by a fine not exceeding two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500), or by both that imprisonment and fine.</i><p>The language is broad, but they didn&#x27;t cover the case of ads where no transaction was even contemplated. This is a bug.

This should be prosecuted. Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act prohibits “unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.”<p>Posting ghost jobs is a deceptive act.

&gt; <i>[...] the majority of them appeared on LinkedIn and the companies’ websites. [...]</i><p>&gt; <i>While some respondents said employers did it to maintain a presence on job boards and build a talent pool, it’s also used [...]</i><p>For securities fraud?

What a colossal waste of everybody&#x27;s time.<p>I wonder how demoralizing this must be on HR workers, having to post a job, screen CV&#x27;s, trying to stay professional while knowing that the hiring manager actually doesn&#x27;t care, having to constantly put people with hopes off, and ultimately let people feel they are not good enough just because some C-hole wants to bring in his buddy who&#x27;s most likely not half as competent as the people who were rejected.

I agree with others that this can be seen as market abuse since it disrupts the essential functioning of our labor markets. After completing my Master&#x27;s, I&#x27;ve since struggled to find a job, only signing a contract yesterday thanks to my past connections and proven work from before I returned to academia. The current job market in my country has been absolutely brutal. I&#x27;ve applied to hundreds of roles. For many interviews, I traveled to other cities only to learn later that the positions I was being interviewed for were canceled entirely, with no one hired.<p>But the real issue are these &quot;ghost&quot; job postings where there&#x27;s no intention to hire anyone at all in the first place. Some companies use them to, I guess, just gather some data and CVs + salary expectations, while others want to appear active and growing to investors, but don’t engage whatsoever when people spend time and apply. This distorts the job market and creates a lot of frustration in applicants. 90% of people I know here and more broadly in Europe have gotten their jobs via connections and people they know. I wouldn’t be surprised if some regulation comes soon, as I doubt I&#x27;m the only one impacted by this situation.

&gt; 62% companies posted them specifically to make their employees feel replaceable<p>wow, HR and management really have a lot of contempt for their staff.<p>i deleted my ln in 2022. i have a deep mistrust of all web platforms. i know what i do on the UI and what happens in the code are not the same.

Hireing and being hired seem to have devolved into a bilateral spamfest. The more applicants per position, the more applications you need to fill.<p>“Always, always, always put networking as one of the top components of your job search strategy,”<p>This is such a strange advice. It is too late when searching for a job.<p>A &#x27;network&#x27; takes year to build.

I think there’s a legitimate market opportunity here. I am seeking a cofounder to build the job board that vets employers, and makes money by charging candidates to access it.<p>The problem to be solved, imo, is ghost listings. - I don’t care if a company ghosts me because they hired someone else - I care if I spend time filling out applications for jobs that don’t exist<p>I’m not sure how to make participation by the employer tractable. They can’t exactly be mandated to hire, can they? Unless I’m trapped in a prison of the mind that seems like too risky of a proposition for them.<p>That said, as a candidate I would happily pay $USD&#x2F;month for access to a job board where I know that the job as posted is definitely for real and definitely getting filled in a certain timeframe. I don’t care if my particular resume gets read, or replied to. I only care that the phenomena of “ghost job” is nonexistent in the walled-garden that I’m paying for access to.

Post makes errors around what nonprofits are and can do. (IANAL, but I do set up and run nonprofits for a living.)<p>Error 1: &quot;In the US, non-profits are heavily regulated in their operations...&quot;<p>Correction: There are no more or less regulations than other sectors, but there is almost ZERO enforcement, so if anything, the nonprofit sector is more accurately described as very lightly regulated.<p>Error 2: &quot;, and exempt from income tax.&quot;<p>Correction: Nonprofits are NOT exempt from income tax on revenue from earned activity that is not mission related, known as Unrelated Business Income.<p>Error 3: &quot;Across the many different structures, though, non-profits have one thing in common: They don&#x27;t have owners.&quot;<p>Correction: Oversimplification - nonprofits are run and functionally owned by a board of directors, people who hire and fire the CEO, decide how revenue is allocated, and approve any merger or dissolution. Nonprofits can also own for-profit subsidiaries (see OpenAI) so there are a lot of gray areas here.<p>In sum, nonprofit status is far more complex that OP thinks and there are a ton of opportunities for skulduggery - just because Ghost is a nonprofit does NOT mean it is free of conflicts or other bad things than companies do.<p>If Ghost really wants to demonstrate its transparency, it should publish its tax returns (IRS form 990) and also an itemized P&amp;L -- then they can stake a claim to being holier than the typical business.<p>People often think that &quot;non-profit&quot; means that the company can&#x27;t make a profit. It actually means that the company doesn&#x27;t have any owners who can personally take the profits. Any revenue earned can only be reinvested.

What we need is, is Job-postings-as-code so that we can automate the deployment of Linkedin postings such that when a recruiter is let go, we can automatically identify their postings and clean them up.<p>We&#x27;ll call it DevHiringOps<p>Seriously tho, always use the companies website instead of believing whatever is on some job posting website.

If it’s a publically traded, report them to the SEC for trying to manipulate the market with the illusion of them hiring a lot as in growing

Related discussion:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41714672">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41714672</a>

Noticed this trend a few years ago from startups keen to look like they were growing much faster than they really were. Personally I wouldn’t begin the process unless an insider had confirmed that a position was a) Real, and b) I would not be disfavoured somehow, meaning that I would be applying on a level playing field.

&gt;81% of recruiters admitted to posting ads for positions that were fake or already filled<p>Ah... recruiters at it again.

Of the obvious fake job postings I&#x27;ve seen, I always assumed they were attempts at Russian or Chinese espionage. Example: for a very brief time I was a US DoD contractor.

Just my own experience but I have never gotten a job with a cold application on a job board. Always been via a recruiter or even better an inside contact.

This is not only a problem for tech workers, but for all industries. The stories I hear from non-tech friends are pretty crazy.

Posting fake jobs should be illegal.

burn it all down, start worker coops.

&gt; They also made ads to “trick overworked employees” into believing that more people would be brought on to alleviate their overwhelming workload.<p>The part of the picture I&#x27;m more interested about is how the managers see it.<p>There must be a lowly manager actually trying to do something about their overworked team, and I assume they have access to HR and know which positions are real which aren&#x27;t. And they know the company not only doesn&#x27;t intend to hire, but is also gaslighting them, and they&#x27;re made part of it.<p>It feels so gloom and just depressing beyond words.

The article doesn&#x27;t really discuss the legality of this, which I&#x27;d be curious to hear the opinion of a lawyer.<p>In other cases, it&#x27;s considered criminal if a company deliberately puts out false information about itself. E.g., if you lie about your companies products (like Theranos), it&#x27;s pretty clear that this is not legal.<p>I don&#x27;t see why it should be legal to lie about your job opportunities.

What kind of political action can we take to stop this infuriating practice?

This is just one example. While tech jobs are diverse, the well-heeled players substantially set the tone and they have gone berserk: over the last few years they have neutron bombed entire zip codes claiming hard times, then posted record-shattering EPS beats, then hired back a bunch of people at substantially lower compensation in a phenomenon so pervasive to have a catchy name: “boomerang”. It’s not even the first time recently got popped for wage fixing, Don’t Poach Gate was like 15 years ago. They’re giving us all the finger in the Crimson, and we will do nothing because we can do nothing.<p>It’s a trivial abuse of monopsony pricing power, it’s illegal in the sense that the laws as written prohibit it on a common-sense, “intended by the legislature” sense, a lawyer can tell you if it’s maybe legal via stare decis via activist judges bench legislating.<p>But more importantly it has destroyed what loose social contract there was: they cannot in fact run these businesses at 60-70% of peak headcount sustainably: they can merely coast on previous investments long enough to crush salaries and then clean up the mess because there isn’t any real competition. They can distort hiring to where McCarthyist vibe checks and loyalty tests hit a precision&#x2F;recall that is Pareto optimized for the minimum amount of competence that admits an endorsement of their nepo baby “nice trumps kind” mythology.<p>And they’re going to get away with it at the level that matters: the individual incentives of executives are nothing to do with the long term interests of shareholders or the commons on this: progress is stalling out in a way that will never show up on a quarterly report in time to matter to the executives.<p>And you can see it in real time: we haven’t had such an embarrassing crop of people who were someone’s roommate at Harvard running the show in at least 30 years, the outcomes are awful, the software sucks, the products suck, and the game is soft communist friction around leaving the platform.

Par for the course for non-tech years for years...

I wish we could do more to disincentivize this kind of blatantly unethical behavior from companies.

Employees look for new jobs they aren&#x27;t seriously interested in. Why shouldn&#x27;t employers do the same?<p>Filtering through a 1000 unemployed people spamming every job listing isn&#x27;t going to give them useful intel.