[Ed. note: While we take some time to rest up over the holidays and prepare for next year, we are re-publishing our top ten posts for the year. Please enjoy our favorite work this year and we’ll see you in 2025.]
Cease me should you’ve heard this one earlier than. You’re searching for a brand new job, trawling the job boards and checking the profession pages of firms you’ve heard good issues about. You discover a position that appears like a fantastic match in your expertise and expertise. You buff up your resume, labor over a canopy letter, and hit Apply together with your fingers crossed.
After which nothing.
The expertise of making use of for a job solely to listen to nothing again—not even a “thanks, however no thanks”—feels more and more widespread currently, and never simply within the realm of software program and expertise. Certain, typically hiring managers are swamped with candidates (or just disorganized) and do not reply to each applicant. However current analysis has proven that heaps of job postings are ghost jobs: listings for roles that a company has no intention of filling, at the least not imminently.
What’s behind the rise in ghost jobs? Why do firms submit them? And the way can job candidates cease losing time and struggling false hope?
It’s robust to find out what number of apparently open jobs are literally ghosts, as a result of most firms don’t need to admit to the observe (Stack Overflow, for the file, doesn’t submit ghost jobs). The Great Resignation and the financial uncertainty of the pandemic years elevated the variety of ghost jobs, in keeping with a Harvard Business School report. One widely cited survey of 649 hiring managers discovered that nearly 40% of hiring managers mentioned their firms posted ghost jobs this 12 months, starting from entry-level roles to positions within the C-suite.
This can be a drawback for anybody attempting to grasp the job market—or get employed in it. As Kara Dennison wrote in Forbes final fall, “posting a job description with out the intention to right away begin the hiring course of inflates the true variety of jobs available in the market and elongates the job search, a lot to the frustration of many job seekers.” Dennison is referring to the Job Openings and Labor Market Turnover Survey (JOLTS) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which reported 9.6 million accessible jobs in September 2023, a determine that she writes “left many questioning why hiring numbers appeared so low regardless of growing job openings.” The reply, Dennison explains, is that “‘job opening’ [means] one thing totally different than what job seekers count on: a present open job that one can apply to and count on to be interviewed for and probably employed.” A few of these “job openings”—make that lots of them—are ghosts.
Firms submit ghost jobs for myriad causes:
- They need to rent somebody—finally. The corporate needs to fill the position sooner or later, however the place isn’t accessible but (for example, as a result of they don’t have headcount or they’ve instituted a hiring freeze).
- The itemizing is out-of-date or they’re hedging their bets. They’ve already employed somebody for the position, however haven’t taken the itemizing down. This might be as a result of the hiring group merely forgot or as a result of the corporate needs to proceed attracting attainable new candidates in case their new rent doesn’t work out.
- They’re “at all times open to new individuals”: The group is at all times looking out for potential candidates for future roles, whether or not or not they’re actively hiring in the meanwhile. This was true of fifty% of respondents in one survey from Make clear Capital.
- They’re performing financial optimism: The group needs to provide the impression that they’re thriving, significantly in an unsure financial local weather. This was the explanation cited by 43% of hiring managers in the Make clear Capital research.
- They’re deceptive their staff or instilling concern: Greater than 60% of firms in the Resume Builder survey who reported posting ghost jobs mentioned they did so “to make staff imagine their workload can be alleviated by new staff.” Yikes. Perhaps worse? Sixty-two % of respondents mentioned they posted ghost jobs expressly to make their staff really feel “replaceable,” an actual case of the FUD coming from inside the home.
Seven in 10 of the hiring managers accountable for posting a ghost job this 12 months “imagine posting pretend jobs is morally acceptable.” Ghost jobs may or may not be legal, relying on what jurisdiction applies. However posting a job you don’t have any intention of filling anytime quickly—particularly should you’re doing it to mislead or unsettle your individual staff—strikes most individuals as a foul factor.
“Ghost jobs expose the uncertainty and lack of transparency within the financial system,” writes Dennison in Forbes. Folks waste power and time making use of for them, following up with hiring managers who aren’t truly hiring, and getting ready for interviews that aren’t going to occur. That’s exhausting and demoralizing.
As we talked about above, half of hiring managers are posting ghost jobs to maintain a expertise pool on the prepared in case of future hiring wants. However from a candidate’s perspective, being on a hiring supervisor’s radar is hardly the identical factor as being thought of for a particular place the corporate is seeking to fill on a well-defined timeline.
The identical Clarity Capital survey we referenced earlier discovered that 85% of firms that submit ghost jobs are literally interviewing candidates for these roles. If a candidate is aware of they’re making use of or interviewing for a theoretical future position as a substitute of a particular place an organization is seeking to fill ASAP, that’s one factor. However the lack of transparency rubs most potential candidates the flawed manner, particularly once they’ve devoted time and power to interviews. Asking staff to interview individuals the corporate doesn’t plan to rent isn’t a great use of their time, both.
Firms that submit ghost jobs additionally danger injury to their repute, if prospects and potential staff understand them as missing transparency or integrity.
It’s not at all times apparent which job openings are actual and that are ghosts. If it have been, ghost jobs can be much less of an issue for job seekers. However there are some tell-tale indicators:
- Very obscure or generic job descriptions. If it reads like a template, it most likely is. Authentic job postings, particularly for extra senior roles, are typically very particular in regards to the obligations concerned and the {qualifications} they’re searching for. Even when the posting itself is obscure, a hiring supervisor seeking to fill a legit position ought to get proper again to you with particulars while you ask.
- You’ve seen this itemizing earlier than. Authentic job postings seem and disappear once they’re stuffed, however ghost jobs (not not like common ghosts) simply hold hanging round. Whereas it’s not a hard-and-fast rule, a job that was posted a number of days in the past is far much less more likely to be a ghost job than one posted a number of months in the past.
- You possibly can’t discover out a lot in regards to the firm. When you discover discrepancies like an e-mail handle that doesn’t match the corporate’s web site or the absence of knowledgeable on-line presence, steer clear. At worst, these job postings could be phishing efforts: scams to get you to share your private data, like a passport or Social Safety quantity, with somebody posing as a recruiter.
Most likely probably the most irritating side of searching for a job is how little of the method is underneath your management. There’s no silver bullet for one of these ghost. Despite your finest efforts to keep away from them, you’ll most likely apply for a handful of jobs that transform ghost gigs. So it is sensible to place your power into the elements of your job search that you just can management:
- Community sensible, not laborious: In Forbes, Dennison means that job seekers community extensively to construct connections and get comfy advocating for themselves. “Strategic networking,” she writes, is “about constructing the appropriate connections inside goal firms you’d prefer to work at. While you community with present staff, you not solely find out about actual roles that they’re hiring for, however you may leverage an worker referral out of your community for a job alternative but to be marketed, which is in the end higher than becoming a member of the group.”
- Turn out to be a storyteller: Studying to inform the story of your profession trajectory—the place you’ve been and the place you need to be—is one other ability job seekers want. “Recruiters and hiring managers choose candidates by how simply they’ll illustrate their expertise concisely,” says Dennison. That is one cause why interviews and networking are nice observe: they permit you to acquire confidence by narrating your experiences and demonstrating your hard-won expertise and perspective.
- Throw your self into steady studying: Committing to studying new expertise, even when it’s important to carve out time out of your present job and different obligations to do it, is vital in a fast-changing, aggressive job market like software program growth. Discover social studying communities and communities of observe the place you’ll be able to study new expertise and ideas and get higher at what you do.
- Keep open. You by no means know the place you would possibly discover your subsequent position. When you’ve at all times been a product supervisor, you could be shocked to seek out you may be profitable on an engineering group, too. When you’ve gravitated towards enterprise firms up to now, search for openings at start-ups or open-source foundations or small companies in want of IT help.
Have you ever been haunted by ghost jobs? Have any insights or experiences to share? Tell us within the feedback.
