Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

What’s the difference between a ghost job and opportunistic hiring? I’ve never seen any team I work for put out a job posting with no intention of hiring and I’ve certainly never participated in interviewing a candidate where there is no intention to hire. However, I have seen my team put out a job posting where we only intend to hire if we get an applicant that is unexpectedly good.

The difference is there aren't hundreds of people applying to some random company's "opportunistic hiring" post, meanwhile the req gets reposted every 2 weeks like clockwork (possibly with a lower salary and more duties), just to see what it would take to get a "reasonable" number of "qualified" applicants.

Both ghost jobs and opportunistic hiring should ideally be labeled as such. Nothing wrong with opportunistic hiring but without a label as such it most definitely distorts the market signals, especially if the ratio of such posting to real postings that will be filled is as high as paper suggests

Your team doesn’t post the ghost job, the HR or talent team does. There’s a variety of reasons why they do it.

Low quality postings are often just there for compliance purposes to justify visas. Less ethical companies may casually mention to outside HR people that folks are applying.

It happens all of the time.

Right. It is all about the team's level of selectiveness at that moment, which does ebb and flow over time.

> put out a job posting with no intention of hiring

i've seen (and worked for) many startups that post reqs prominently to signal to the world (investors, customers, etc) that "things are going great" and "we're growing" while not even able to afford a req.

> never participated in interviewing a candidate where there is no intention to hire

I haven't seen as much of that, but have been in situations where the company is either doing great (transitioning during an acquisition) or not so great (running out of money) but you keep interviewing to "look normal" or to keep the pipeline just in case things get back to normal.

And people get job descriptions written for them. They may--or may not--be actually posted. (I'm genuinely curious and wish I had looked at the time about my last job.) Wouldn't mean no one else would have had a shot but almost certainly not a random applicant putting in an online application.