Ghost Jobs: the plague haunting the modern jobseeker [#83]

If you’re confused about the job market, this article is for you. 

In a world where applying to jobs is as easy as clicking one button on LinkedIn, you stand out by putting in the effort: customizing CVs, working connections inside the company, figuring out the hiring manager, working with an intermediary, going the extra mile. 

You do all this – just to learn that you’ve just applied to a job that doesn’t really exist. 

What a waste of time. Why would companies do that?

Turns out, there’s a bunch of (good, bad, and ugly) reasons to do this. And while identifying these “ghost jobs” isn’t an exact science, there are a few indicators that you can follow. 

Let’s dive in. 🤿

What are ghost jobs and why do companies post them?

Based on what I’ve seen in my research, there are good, bad, and absolutely terrible and despicable reasons to post ghost jobs. 

The Good

• Honeypots: Companies might throw a job posting out there and “see what sticks”. While they have no pressing need to fill the position, if the right profile comes along, they might very well jump. 
• A/B Testing: Sometimes, companies might post the exact same job under a few different titles to see what performs better (given that it’s not misleading). For example, you might see a Growth Marketer role also as “Growth Associate” or “Commercial Associate”. This is easy to identify – if three similar jobs are posted, and all of them have the same copy, you can safely assume that only one person will be hired here. 

I’ve used the “honeypot” strategy myself when building the international business at Sdui. We were trying to identify what country we should expand to next, and a big factor in that decision is the availability of talent.

So we opportunistically posted “Country Launcher / Manager” job ads in 10 different markets, with the intent of hiring for one or two of those. 

In the end, we stuck with our analysis and went into markets where we were most convinced, but had someone come along for a market like, say, Greece, with the exact skillset that we needed, we probably would have taken a shot at it. 

The Bad

• Building pipeline: apparently, some companies always have postings up to “build candidate pipeline”. I think that’s dumb. Either a candidate is looking, or isn’t. You build a database of CVs that you’ll never look at again, make candidates waste their time, and when you have an opening in the future, the candidates in your pipeline likely aren’t looking. (Even renowned companies like ASML appear to be doing this.)
• Covering your ass: this is more of a corporate move, when you already know who you’re going to hire, but need to follow regulations and interview at least 3 candidates. This is unfortunate for the candidates who apply for this job, and almost impossible to identify, but here I’d rather blame the game and not the player. 
• Attracting candidates by mislabeling your job: I see a lot of job postings labeled as “Founder’s Associate” that in reality are sales or finance jobs. Yes, a Founder’s Associate job will attract more applicants than an SDR or Accounting job. Because it is more interesting. But none of these candidates will be happy in an SDR or Accounting job, so you might as well save yourself and the candidates the time. 

All these things are somewhat understandable, just not very smart. 

But now, it gets downright … ugly. 

The Ugly

• Signaling growth to investors: growing companies hire lots of people. And if you hire lots of people, you have lots of openings. So you trick investors and other stakeholders into believing that your company is on a high-growth trajectory by posting jobs that don’t exist. Not only is this deceptive to the candidates who apply, but it’s straight up lying. There are no clear rules in business, but … that’s not fair game. 
• Convincing current employees that their workload will be reduced: companies will post jobs to pretend to their overworked employees that they’re looking to add workforce, even if they aren’t.  
• Making employees feel replaceable: even worse, some companies might post a job that’s currently filled to make the person doing it feel replaceable. I don’t even know what to say. 

But it gets worse. These three reasons listed above are – according to a 2024 survey of 649 hiring managers – more common than simply building pipeline.

Are you f**king kidding me? 

But just when I thought that this has to be the lowest a company can go, I found this Reddit post: an employer had a candidate that was “okay”, but figured they’d offer them the job anyway and if they didn’t impress within the first 2 weeks, just fire them again. 

Making a candidate quit their previous job to start a new one, with a high likelihood intention to fire them? That’s borderline criminal. 

I believe in business ethics: to make the right decision when making the ethically wrong decision would get you a tiny advantage. 

Ghost jobs are one example of gaining a tiny advantage at the cost of someone else: the candidate’s time and energy. That’s wasteful and dishonest, and will eventually make your talent pipeline much worse. 

The best candidates tend to have high ethical standards and will expect transparency and honesty on behalf of the company. Posting ghost jobs isn’t how you show this. 

Regardless of ethics, Ghost jobs are a reality of the job market. Let’s take a look at a few strategies you can use to identify and avoid them. 

How to identify them & avoid Ghost jobs 

Identifying Ghost jobs is an inaccurate science, and you can never be fully sure that your application goes anywhere.

But you can find indicators. It might be a Ghost job posting if: 

• It’s online for a long time with lots of applications, yet never goes away. This implies that the position either has been filled and just hasn’t been taken down, or that for some reason they don’t want to fill the position. 
• It’s on LinkedIn, but not on the company’s official careers page. The friction of whipping up a job posting on LinkedIn is much lower than publishing it on your company’s page. 
• The language inside the post is super vague – existing jobs have real, concrete things that you need to do when you’re doing them. 

A few good strategies to avoid running into them at all:  

• Going to in-person events – if someone promotes a job and you can apply directly there, it’s likely to be real; generally speaking, the more effort a company puts in, the higher the likelihood for the job not to be a ghost job. 
• Going through a trusted intermediary that pre-vets jobs: this could be a headhunter, a personal network, or a platform like Generalyst. While companies sometimes change their mind (and an application then feels like a Ghost job), having someone else vet the opportunity is a good start.
• Proactively message people on the hiring team: “hey, saw this job online and am considering applying – is that team still actively hiring?” Surprisingly often, the team will have no idea about the opening. 

Generally good advice: always apply through company website as opposed to LinkedIn.

As a recruiter, it’s always preferable to have candidates in the “normal” workflow. Nothing wrong with adding some touch outside of that platform (ie. reaching out to the hiring manager on LinkedIn), but use the most official channel possible. 

Now, I believe that Ghost jobs are simply a symptom of an underlying dynamic that's screwing over candidates and hiring managers alike. ⬇️

Why the job market has become inefficient 

It’s become too easy to post jobs and to apply to jobs.

LinkedIn regularly prompts me to post a job, and to use their AI to generate the description. Kind of like it’s prompting me to writ a post, but … this is not the same.

With that kind of accessibility, it’s tempting to throw out that ghost job and see what sticks.

And with so many Ghost jobs, it’s only fair and understandable that candidates put less effort into their application – ideally, by just sending over their standardized CV. 

The volume becomes so high that neither party can distinguish between signal and noise. Even if you’re actually hiring for a job, you’re swamped with hundreds, if not thousands, often generic applications. No human can make proper decisions when presented with such an array of choice. 

Which, in the end, creates an inefficient market: too many applications are received on the official channels, so hiring managers resort to two strategies: 

1. Using unofficial channels like their network (→ don’t know anyone at the company? You’re out of luck.)
2. Resort to the roughest possible heuristics (→ you weren’t top 10% at a target uni and never worked at BCG? You’re out of luck.) 

This is how you hire a “good enough” team, but not a championship team. 

So it’s up to someone else to resolve these market inefficiencies: the middlemen.

Vacation rentals and taxis were highly inefficient, opaque markets – until Uber and Airbnb came along. These middlemen have drastically improved the experience of everybody involved, and increased the overall market size massively. 

I’m not building the Uber or Airbnb for Jobs. That’s a story I’d have to tell if I was raising venture capital.

I’m building the platform that:

1. Identifies outlier talent based on character, not CV 
2. Matches jobs based on realistic working fit, not imagined criteria 
3. Recognizes a broad skillset as an asset, not a liability 

That’s Generalyst. So if you want to avoid ghost jobs or 100s of AI-generated CVs, this is the place to be. 

(Hold on one second, when did this turn into an ad? My apologies, I got carried away – but now that we’re here, you should tell your friends about Generalyst. Thank you.) 

Well. That's it for today. Back to work.

Have a fantastic week. LFG. 🔥 

PS: Found this cool tool for jobseekers in the depths of Reddit while researching this post. 

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