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

Is everyone ignoring the fact that companies do this to make themselves look bigger than they are compared to the competition and/or to pretend economic success?

That's a really good point. It's public data, so it's also a way for investors to gage success.

And growth.

It’s a pretty bad signal if your series B startup isn’t hiring actively all the time.

Sure, also HR needs to do this to look busy. They will sell management on doing this instead of being downsized themselves.

It's certain abused for below-the-line marketing, such as for appearing bigger than they are, but also to make them look more competent by adding ridiculous requirements such as fluency in at least five different languages.

Blame wall street speculators.

I pretty much see it as a negative signal now. If I happen across a board for a given company, look at the positions they have posted, and then come back to it a few months later and see the exact same ones listed without any change, then I just move on to something else. It tells me a few things: either they don't know what they're looking for and are just fishing, they want to make it appear they are grow-grow-growing but still can't figure out exactly what they want, they're trying to posture like they are bigger than they are, like you said. If they're playing the game, I probably don't want to be there.

I wonder who this is effective signaling mechanism for.

Any investor that's on the board is going to have access to data that tells the real story (or if they don't they're neglecting their fiduciary duty).

Any potential investor that's going to lead a funding round is going to do enough diligence to see what kind of financial shape they're in. And if the company doesn't have money to be increasing headcount, it'd look like they're making irresponsible hiring decisions.

For customers -- small customers are probably not doing a level of diligence that would involve going out and looking at job postings. Large enterprise customers potentially are, but when dealing with startups, they'll often have clauses in their contracts that give them access to some level of financial data to ensure the vendor they're getting into bed with isn't about to collapse (though I suppose many of them never actually enforce those clauses).

Employees pay a lot of attention to job postings, but they also pay attention to interview flow and hiring. If you have a job posting out, and no ones getting interviewed, people are going to notice pretty quickly (they're especially going to notice if someone else gets to put a req out, but the req for their dept keeps getting denied).

Definitely not suggesting the idea is wrong -- companies have certainly done far more nefarious things, just wondering who they are trying to signal to with this.

There are well know ways to solve these issues. For example, companies have always used the strategy of firing the "bad" workers after a few years and then hiring more to replace them. Even though there is hiring going on, the net difference may well be zero or negative. Nobody would suspect this by looking just at the number of people being hired.