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

> 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.

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 "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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.