A job listing advertisement on a digital platform costs next to nothing, but the intelligence it can provide a company — even without any intent to fill the position — can be significant.
A job listing alone can help a company build a potential talent base to draw on for the future, enable it to investigate market trends, or draw attention to the company as one experiencing growth.
These are just a few of the reasons why the phenomenon of “ghost jobs” is growing rapidly. Ghost jobs are open positions published by companies with no intention of hiring for them. The practice has obvious negative social and economic consequences. It affects the efficiency of the labor market, increases costs for candidates, and complicates the analysis of data by researchers and policy makers.
Hunter Ng of City University of New York recently published a research paper, “Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs.” In investigating this phenomenon, Ng found the practice is becoming increasingly common, especially at large companies and in sectors requiring high skills, such as information technology.
Why is it so hard to find a job?
Hunter Ng conducted research based on nearly 270,000 reviews from the “Interviews” section of the popular recruiting platform Glassdoor. He deployed the LLM BERT model supported by an advanced NLP algorithm to conduct deep linguistic analysis on jobseekers’ posts about their interviewing experiences.
The AI analysis enabled Ng to separate poor interview experiences between what he calls “sour grapes,” in which a interviewee appears to simply be expressing being upset with a rejection, and “ghost job” reviews, such as one in which “there were no questions asked on competence, nor clarification on expected salary,” and no resolution on the experience, Ng writes.
According to Ng’s LLM BERT analysis, up to 21% of job offers could be classified as ghost jobs. Ng goes on to identify a number of reasons why ghost listings exist.
The low cost of posting ads is important, Ng says. Thanks to platforms such as Glassdoor, the cost of posting job offers is minimal or zero. Companies can therefore publish ads en masse, regardless of their actual recruitment needs.
The real need, in many instances, is to build a talent base — especially for highly specialized positions. Publishing job ads enables companies to collect applications and information about potential candidates to have a pool on hand to quickly respond to future employment needs.
Interestingly, according to Ng, ghost offers are also an element of intra-company games. HR departments can easily create the illusion of high activity in this way, which increases their value to the company.
On a macro scale, ghost jobs affect economic indicators such as the Beveridge curve, distorting the picture of the relationship between unemployment and job vacancies. Ng suggests the need for greater transparency in the publication of job advertisements and possible regulations to limit this practice.
More reasons to worry
Interestingly, “ghost job” is aligned with another negative employment phenomena in the digital space. The term “ghost work,” popularized by researchers Mary Gray and Siddartha Suri in 2019, refers to work performed remotely in the digital space, such as content marketing or proofreading, without formal employment status.
The problem of “ghost jobs” is being addressed by a growing number of researchers and companies, analyzing their impact on the labor market and the strategies used by employers.
For example, a study conducted by MyPerfectResume found that as many as 81% of recruiters admit to posting fake job offers. The authors of the study interpret the intentions of these practices in a similar way to Ng: building a talent pool, testing markets, or improving the company’s image.
Specialized positions in IT, such as AI engineers, data scientists, or software developers, require unique skills. Companies post ghost jobs to constantly monitor the availability of such specialists and their salary expectations. In the technology sector, this practice is mainly driven by the need to build a talent pool and test the availability of specialists. Companies also use these practices to test the effectiveness of ads and monitor the competition.
Publishing false information pays off
A survey of more than 1,600 hiring managers conducted by ResumeBuilder this year shed further light on the ghost job phenomenon. According to the survey, more than 80% of recruiters said they posted jobs without intending to fill them, and 41% indicated that more than half of the jobs were fake. Of tech companies, 40% posted fake jobs in the past year, and 79% of those still had active ads.
The fake ads cover all job levels: entry-level (63%), midlevel (68%), senior-level (53%), and executive (45%). The most common outlets for this disinformation are company websites (72%), LinkedIn (70%), ZipRecruiter (58%), Indeed (49%), and Glassdoor (48%). Most of the phantom listings remain active for a month (31%), a few weeks (28%), and in some cases, a year or more (9%).
Recruiters also declared reasons for these actions, and the spectrum is much wider than one might assume:
- 67% of companies want to be open to external talent;
- 66% want to create the impression of growth;
- 63% try to convince current employees that their workload will be reduced;
- 62% want to give current employees the impression that they are not irreplaceable;
- 59% collect applications to create a candidate database.
As many as 68% of recruiter respondents to the survey claim fake job postings have a positive impact on revenue, and 77% have noticed an increase in company employee productivity when fake jobs are listed. In this regard, 43% of managers consider ghost jobs to be completely acceptable, while only 10% strongly condemn them.
Ban specters
Staffing organization BC Management posted an article on the ghost job phenomenon, adding some basic warning signs for a false announcement:
- the advertisements are general or repeated for a long time without visible progress in the recruitment process;
- no response to applications, even after contact attempts;
- lack of deadlines, e.g., no application deadline or flexible start dates;
- low reputation rating of the company on platforms such as Glassdoor, where you can find information about the experiences of other candidates.
As ghost jobs continue to proliferate on job boards, there may be little left to do but guard against these practices — or wait, as Hunter Ng suggests, for regulations.