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

>The trend could be due to the low marginal cost of posting additional job ads and to maintain a pipeline of talents. After adjusting for yearly trends, I find that ghost jobs can explain the recent disconnect in the Beveridge Curve in the past fifteen years. The results show that policy-makers should be aware of such a practice as it causes significant job fatigue and distorts market signals.

Very interesting.

I certainly have "gotten" what I thought was a ghost job. I went through the whole process ... they "wanted" to hire me. But didn't actually have a start date / couldn't actually hire me. For everyone involved though they seemed to be able to justify posting the job, interviews, because IMO, it made THEM look busy / effective.

The whole hiring people industrial complex seems oriented to be focused on the process of hiring (high fives for ever more complex hiring processes / delays) ... and not at all on the outcome (did we hire someone, were they good?).

It's the ultimate system where simply doing anything is "success" / and more processes rewarded, and there's almost no good measureless about outcomes for the company.

> to maintain a pipeline of talents

See, this is the part I don’t understand.

If they don’t have real jobs available, what’s the point of building this “pipeline”?

Are they genuinely going to plan to use this pipeline for future roles? Because simply posting a real job in the future will still get 1000s of applications which builds _real_ pipeline

I don’t see recruiters going back through a bunch of old resumes to find “the one”. That’s not how that works and isn’t an efficient use of time

Seems like a bunch of busy work for nothing

I don't understand it either. I never had the company I had this experience with call me back, the whole experience was pretty off-putting.

But I suspect the "pipeline of talent" might be the internal excuse and in fact .... again there's no mensurables so no way to know if it is true or not. But someone can say they added folks to their "pipeline" like they add contacts on linkedin.

Everybody has to do something to justify their paycheck. If you’re in hiring and there’s no jobs, you have to do something.

Also, you can't really use the pipeline a year after the fact.

It is super embarrassing when a company heavily delayed gets back on an application.

This is why many job seekers are perpetually passive/work through recruiters. An in-house recruiter may be there to perpetually screen for purple unicorn candidates that bend the CEO's hiring freeze - a contract recruiter won't work with a firm that can't actually hire.

> because IMO, it made THEM look busy / effective.

A KPI in hiring is offers made / accepted. I don't think the HR team gets credit for reviewing applicants and running interviews that don't result in one/both of these.

One reason could be to have faster replacement if someone leaves.

The other is to make it look like they are busy and growing even when not.

That's where the ghosting comes in. If you're always ghosting, then you always have recent people to get back to, not months old.

The pipeline isn't a lossless FIFO queue, in other words. People go in one end and are dropped out the other. In between are the recents you can call if a spot actually opens up.

It makes everyone look busy. It helps calibrate interviewers so that the company remembers how to hire people. It maintains the illusion of growth.

The last point is important, historically startups/teams faced the risk of exodus once hiring stopped. As an employee, hiring is one of the few signals you have on the health of an opaque business.

Having openings posted looks good to venture capitalists, which is, more and more, the way to succeed in our economy.

This has secondary effects of teaching people that having open positions is good just for the sake of it. They don't stop to analyze why they think that.

While the workers might be busy there are managers or HR people who want to appear busy, and job postings is a thing they can do. It also feels good to see a bunch of applicants and feel like you're in a position of power while sorting through them--and of some actual work comes along you can just ignore the applicants.

In short, there's no reason not to post a ghost job.

This is simple to solve: just don't make too many offers, and complain that you "couldn't find talent".

I wish I could say I have a better experience with recruiters but I haven't. I've heard there are good recruiters, I don't doubt it, but it doesn't seem easy to find anymore than the next job is.

This "pipeline" thing is just an excuse. Companies are ALWAYS in the look for a special talent. This is not a real problem. If they find a very competent person they will offer the job. Otherwise, which is 99% of the time, they'll just say they're building a pipeline. It is the same mindset of a predator, they can justify being always looking for new pray, even though they know they'll only get it very rarely.

That's how it works in sane environments; unfortunately those can be quite rare.

Exactly, you don't build up a catalogue of people you can get back to.

Ie. this technique does not make sense - search for people on demand instead.

There really isn't a "good" recruiter from a candidate perspective. Their incentives are to support the firms they recruit for, and screen candidates. They do not work for your benefit.

My experience early in my career was that I needed to work with many of these recruiters until I found a gig. My experience at the time was weak, and my resume reflected that. I had to take the gigs which had lower competition e.g. systems administration.

It can take months to hire a specialist from both but if you're constantly spinning plates, you have some lukewarm contacts as well as a list of obvious no's.

This isn't anything new. This exact same thing happened during the 2000-era dot-com bubble burst. There was a huge hiring freeze across all tech companies, yet somehow they were still posting job ads, but nobody was hiring. I even moved cities to work at a job where 10 of my friends worked (including the CEO as a good friend), and when I went in for the "interview" (the job was supposedly guaranteed) the CEO said he couldn't hire me because of a hiring freeze. I ended up freelancing for the company on-and-off for a couple of years, but it was barely enough to keep me fed. There was no other work anywhere. It was a rough 4 years, and we're going through the same thing now and have been for a while. I'm glad that this time I have a bit of job security, but I feel sorry for those that don't. I tried to warn everyone I could a few years ago that if they had a job, even if they didn't like it, they should consider staying because it's going to get rough. People laughed at me for suggesting this, but now nobody is laughing.

I was working for Meta in Bellevue, WA in 2022. Got laid off. Applied to several positions at MS (I was living in Redmond at the time), couldn't get a callback. Months and months go by, get a job, move across the country, get an email 9-12 months after applying that they'd like to interview me. I didn't even bother responding.

Not uncommon for in-house recruiters to keep sourcing new candidates and making them jump through all interviewing hoops even if they know the reqs aren’t open or till the morning they all get fired in a layoff that they know is coming. Agencies probably less so because they get paid commission.

Searching for people from scratch in reaction to a sudden demand will have much more latency than having someone you can pull from a recent roster of validated candidates.

It's exactly the same like how an integrated circuit can pull a sudden power demand from a capacitor placed next to it (often required by the datasheet), rather than from the power supply upstream, so there is no voltage sag affecting it and nearby components.

Or, in computing, prefetch and speculative execution, and such.

The good recruiters are the ones who won't put you forward for a job that you're not qualified for, and will advocate for you during the hiring process in a job that you are qualified for. I have worked with recruiters like this before. But you need to screen the recruiter a bit, at least make sure that the jobs they are proposing for you actually make sense for you. If you are asking for SRE jobs in New York and they send you a DB Admin job req in New Haven, don't waste your time with that recruiter or that job.

Sort of. 3rd-party recruiters get paid on commission: they make money when their candidate gets hired in favor of the other recruiters' candidates. In that sense, the incentives are actually aligned in your favor when you're applying for a job that you really want: the recruiter is motivated to work to get you hired, and is only constrained by the need to not annoy the hiring manager. The incentives turn against you when the recruiter doesn't have any jobs that you really want, but is trying the numbers approach and putting you forward for things that you aren't really qualified for, "just in case" it's a good fit. You need to be aware that both of these scenarios can occur, so you can steer yourself away from the latter and towards the former.

The recruiter is still not really working for you, and the incentives are not aligned enough in your favor.

What we need is more of an "agent" like actors have: Maybe I don't have a full picture of what a Hollywood agent does, but I imagine they're constantly working in the background, looking for gigs for their busy actor, doing all the toil and paperwork and research on their behalf. Their end product is: "Studio X wants you to work on film A this year, and then Studio Y wants you to work on film B next year."

I could see a software engineer agent who gets paid by the engineer to do all of the application-filling-out, all the LinkedIn clicking, all of the company research, all of the pavement-pounding networking and paperwork toil, and all the interviewing, and then out comes: "Companies X, Y, and Z have these offers for you, which one do you want?" I'd probably pay a fortune, or maybe even a percentage of my comp, for a service like that.

> It is the same mindset of a predator, they can justify being always looking for new pray, even though they know they'll only get it very rarely.

This doesn't sound right; meat spoils. If you've just killed something, it would be a lot of effort and danger to kill something else, all for almost zero benefit.

Out of frustration, and because this now validates what I was thinking but couldn't put my finger on, I sat an AI agent down to 100% tailor cover letters and which resume to use based on the description of the job in question.

Turns out none of that actually mattered if the whole point is to generate busy-work and turn HR into another function like sales/marketing afraid to lose their budget for the year, or even worse to evaluate market conditions poorly. This entire thing should be illegal with the study at hand as evidence to make it so.

If you have a "sudden demand" demand I would say that you have other issues in your HR planning strategy.

You should not plan to do projects that require you to hire a special resource tomorrow.

And also: Having an open pipeline really does not hedge for that, and you open pipeline might not align with your sudden need.