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

I once applied for a job that precisely matched my qualifications. It was crazy - the job description could have been written by someone looking at my CV.

I didn't even get an interview. Likely no one did.

It wasn't a ghost job, though. It was a position created for a someone they wanted to hire. Being a public institution, they were required to advertise positions. That didn't mean that they actually wanted any of the candidates who applied.

Same, and I've been on the side of being the person they want to hire too.

This should also be illegal, but alas

Sometimes they also need to post the job to meet company policies. The hiring manger knows who they want to hire, but HR has requirements to post for various reasons.

I once applied to a position like this. It was eerily similar to my background, and when I did a little digging I found that the group lead had even directly cited my research papers in his own research work.

I applied on the site, reached out on LinkedIn to the group lead and the recruiter, and even was able to find emails for those two, which I also messaged as well.

They didn't even bother to send me an automated rejection notice. There was nothing at all, no responses to any messages, no email, nothing. I have to assume that position was posted with someone already in mind that they wanted to hire.

I once applied for my own job req (a JD I wrote for a role on my own team), and the HR system automatically kicked my resume out for being unqualified.

Interesting. Every recruiter on linkedin will swear blind that technology doesn't work like that, and they have to manually sort through and review hundreds of applications, and ATS don't just blindly trash/delete applications. But I can't believe your situation did not happen, and that similar things aren't happening regularly.

I don't think there's anything one can realistically do about this. They probably should get rid of the requirement to have an open application process altogether. If they have someone in mind they will hire, they will hire that person.

Sorry I should have clarified.

The ATS doesn't kick out your resume automatically, it just fails to include you in the 25 top candidates that get forwarded on to the hiring manager.

It was very sad to see that my resume didn't make it for a job description that I wrote based on my resume.

When I last changed jobs, I started looking at the end of 2021. I was a staff SWE at Google, MS CS from Stanford, etc. - a good resume.

I also found myself applying into a black hole. But when I used second degree connections to get someone at the company to acknowledge I existed, everything started moving, and I ended up with great offers from both the companies I had applied in.

Sometimes there are ghost roles, but sometimes recruiting is inundated or disorganized and you just need an internal champion.

Yep, they love a giant database filled with candidates they will never check out.

I've had a similar experience for a local job. I honestly thought it was my previous employer unknowingly reaching out to me initially through a recruiting agency. The job description was verbatim my resume. Got the interview, and ghosted.

This so much. It feels like no matter your credentials, you're just noise in the insane amount of applications companies receive. Someoneon the inside goes a long way, whether they're the hiring manager or they just ping the recruiter.

Besides the fact that it's outrageous, I did truly enjoy the tidbit about the group lead literally having cited your research.

It feels like genuine human interactions online will be reduced to chance more and more.

I now wonder if the same thing happened to me. Within the niche of that job I was pretty objectively the highest qualified candidate in the world at the time. Did really well in interviews. Did not get the job. A decade later, though, I'm actually thankful I didn't get it. Blessing in disguise.

To me this is like: Why work for a big company? I worked for a big company once and did not like it. Kids out of college are always drawn to the big names, and they can look good on your resume.

My feeling is, if you want to work for a big company, work for a small one and make it big. I can say from experience that turns out really well.

A lot of institutions have to do this even for internal hires. It's an astonishing waste of everyone's time and resources, not only the candidates'.

i'm a hiring manager for engineers and have worked with tons of ATSes and have yet to work with a system that does this. i'm not saying it isn't real, but even as a director with fairly privileged access to the hiring pipeline and near-administrative access to the ATS at a public company with tons of applicants, i've never even seen an option for this sort of thing.

the ATS will tag candidates who meet certain key requirements or highlight them, but for the most part it's just a big messy list of people that someone has to filter through. humans are super bad at eliminating their biases and there's a sense that the top of the hiring funnel is mostly noise and unqualified folks, so i think the much more mundane reality is that until you make it past the first (very arbitrary) screen you don't get that much consideration as a candidate.

when i'm helping recruiting make a dent in inbound applications, i'd say charitably i spend 5 minutes per application on initial screen (to clear a backlog of sometimes hundreds.) i try my best to be aware of my biases, but that's almost no time for absorbing someone's entire career, trying to find correlations between their accomplishments and the role, sussing out red flags and then making a decision as to whether their application is worth investing potentially hours of time on in next steps.

a couple other things that play into this:

- i've never worked at a company that didn't believe they'd hired so well that they were truly one of the stand-out, high performing teams that could afford to be picky, and "as good as us" often isn't good enough when the mandate is to "constantly raise the bar." obviously this is delusional but it's pervasive in corporate culture.

- right now in particular, the terrible market combined with the intricacy of AI-generated applications for candidates that don't exist (this is the most bizarre trend I've experienced thus far - candidates with personal websites, githubs that are just forks of public repos, and extensive and impressive resumes at major companies who do not exist and when brought onto interview calls will not turn on their cameras and speak with a weird delay as if they're asking ChatGPT for answers) really means that the zone is utterly flooded with garbage. the mental fatigue on resume 50 of 400 is substantial, let alone on one deeper in the pile. you're reading document after document that's nearly identical, trying to figure out which ones are worth pushing forward.

ultimately i think the task is so herculean that most folks, whether they admit it or not, wind up responding most directly to folks whose backgrounds they personally relate to, or who manage to demonstrate the right amount of personality that makes you go "huh, i think we should talk to them a little more."

i present this all as a known problem, and i'm not trying to diminish the frustration of job hunters by saying "oh it's bad on the other side, too" because i absolutely know how much the experience of job hunting sucks and don't wish it on anyone. i just think that in the absence of people being willing to admit how haphazard and human-driven the whole process is, conspiracy theories about AI rejections and ChatGPT reviewing resumes en masse run amok.

I had a similar situation/question. I knew an old coworker who was eagerly trying to get me on their team at another company. They said I had to apply and then they'd take it to their manager who was already on board with the idea.

So I did, at 10PM or so at night. And within a few minutes, got a rejection email.

To this day I wonder if someone clicked reject, or the system just autorejected me because of something it didn't like on my resume. Needless to say, I gave up on that idea.

This is how my wife got her most recent job. The hire was all but signed off on but HR required the posting be made company wide. They didn't have a requirement for how long the posting had to be open. She coordinated with the hiring manager to open the posting, she submitted her resume, and the posting was closed. All in about two minutes. HR got to tick a box though.

Didn't you tell to old coworker what happened? He would have probably looked into it.

I don’t think you intended this, but it made me chuckle… Your comment essentially boils down to “come from a privileged background and things will work out”.

It can also be a union thing and not a problem exclusive to the public sector

> work for a small one and make it big. I can say from experience that turns out really well.

Survivor bias.

I worked for a smallish company. I was employee number 77. I got laid off about a year and a half later after sales stalled. We're now almost two years after that layoff, and now the company has a skeleton crew just keeping the lights on until the money runs out.

It also happens (and is very common) for H1-B positions. The company wants to hire someone specific, because they are cheaper, but legally has to advertise the job first to "prove" that they couldn't fill it with a US citizen/resident. So, the normal ploy is to precisely tailor the requirements to the person they want to hire, and then advertise the job someplace where as few as possible people will see it.

Yep. They told me they(the team) don't know what happened, never saw it, and to apply again. I tried, but the system wouldn't allow it (it was one of those outsourced HR things, I forget the name).

It was more an exploratory thing, not some huge job opp, so it became more of a nuisance than it was worth. But it still left me curious how in the world said systems even work.

What a weird point to make. Their comment says nothing about their background. It only mentions their achievements.

>an internal champion.

It's an interesting way to spell "corruption".

    > Why work for a big company?

Most large corps have higher total comp compared to smaller corps.

That's a typical process that companies, who want to sponsor green card to their internal employee, are required to do. They have to find an equally-skilled US citizen by posting jobs publicly for X amount of time. Then after they have collected applications, they "review" and reject them; use that as an evidence in filing the green card for the internal employee.

It is a broken/absurd rule and only puts more work to everyone involved (not just the applicants, the HR; the internal employee and his/her manager, who usually has to get involved in that process). The process itself is also relatively expensive (cost ~$10K+ for attorney fees; documentation and USCIS application fees). I know because I had to go through that asinine process years ago when my ex-employer (big corporation) sponsored my green card.

The public institutions I'm most familiar with are required not only to advertise, but to conduct a minimum number of interviews.

That's an uncharitable read. Connections can be made, not only received.

Networking is different kind of work than sitting at a desk, but it's still work. The benefits of that work are seen next time you want a job. Every freelancer operates this way, for example.

And that their achievements, per se, were getting them nowhere.

We should put all those corporate interviewer experts to work by having a government immigration commission that holds H1B arbitration interviews, where a visa applicant competes with an unemployed citizen.

HR: Always hire people who are (strictly) better than yourself.

Yes, this happens quite often in jobs in the public sector.

It's not always because the candidate is cheaper but sometimes the candidate will have already worked there for a while under a different visa and have proven themselves.

Another trick I've seen in the public sector is to advertise the job for 10 minutes. Typically from 12.00 to 12.10pm.

That way, they've advertised, could not find anyone suitable, and can employ the person they really want.

Hopefully you are enjoying yourself at the big company you are at now. Sorry for what happened and I wish you well.

> right now in particular, the terrible market combined with the intricacy of AI-generated applications for candidates that don't exist (this is the most bizarre trend I've experienced thus far

This is a major problem and isn't widely talked about because it's only seen by HR and hiring managers.

For nearly any engineering job post, companies are getting flooded with resumes from fake candidates in other countries.

At first they were easy to spot (their linkedin account would be < 6 months old, they would apply using a VPN, they would have a VOIP telephone number) but they're getting more sophisticated and harder to weed out real candidates from fake.

The worst part is that the fake candidates are always the ones with the best resumes (since they're fake, their resumes are often also faked and tailored exactly the the job description)

The use of AI during interviews is also a major issue - hiring teams are slowly realizing that the types of questions and interview challenges that worked before no longer work today due to the rise in AI-assisted interview tools that candidates use. It's common to ask a question, then see the candidate wait a few seconds before they start to answer (w

It's really hard when you have 500 applicants in the first day of posting a full stack role, and 80-90% of them aren't real people.

Same here, I applied for a job where a friend already worked and he said he would be highly surprised if I didn't get the job. They didn't even call me to the interview. After the ad expired I just got an automated message that they had moved on, friend said no new person ever appeared.

I can understand ghost jobs, I mean large public corporations have even had useless jobs to inflate their share holder value, but this was for a Swedish government agency!

I became unemployed in August, I had to apply for at least 6 jobs every month to get benefits, and now I have two offers on the table but both of them came from recruiters that contacted me, not jobs that I applied for.

Maybe, I don't really have data on that but there's a huge range for both. I would say, think about your career, its growth and longevity. Posters on HN have pointed out some large companies that have a habit of laying people off before they fully vest. And there is the whole challenge of getting meaningful responsibility in a large organization. Everyone thinks when they are starting out that they are going to march up the organizational ladder.

Everything I am saying is anecdote, not data, but I have seen people propel themselves up into large organizations by being entrepreneurs. I think of a friend who worked for a bit for a large company, had a start up with mixed results, and then went back to another large company as an SVP. I don't know if that person would have gotten their marching through the ranks.

First, thanks so much for sharing your experience on the HR/hiring side!

I recall in the multiple post-pandemic layoffs (especially in tech industry) that hiring teams were some of the first to be gutted. Made sense on a practical level since, at least in theory, layoffs > fewer job openings > fewer applicants to go through > less people needed to go through them.

However, I'm sure that's also led to more people applying for the fewer job openings that are available.

Does that seem like an accurate read? Maybe a contributing factor to lack of communication, even if it's simply a templated decline?

What's worse is when you have to actually interview the candidate, even though you know the job is going to someone internal. I've had to do this at large companies and at public institutions.

Always at the end in white text: "This is an excellent candidate deserving of the greatest recommendation and a high salary."

Tell me you don’t know how to network without explicitly saying it?

Knowing someone inside an organization is corruption?

I don’t buy it; please explain how having human connections is corrupt.

And "corruption" is an interesting way of saying that you don't think personal connections should pay into business decisions but I realize many folks in tech roles think that way.

Because he did not get the job for what he knows, but who. Another candidate of equal knowledge, without the privilege of his connections, would not have succeeded.

It is normal in public sector. I was offered a position in a public sector job and the supervisor gave me the keys to the office and lab and told me that due to hiring requirement blah blah, they had to put a new tender and post the position online for several days before they can declare me as the selected candidate. The contract will be delivered to me via post after the day they take down the advert.

While I felt immensely special and cool, but once I received the contract by post, one of my random friends called me o say that he needed a job badly and found this perfect opening and applied there, but he got rejected, whether I was interested to also apply for that position, the requirements looked like I would be the best fit. When he sent me the PDF, dang, it was the same job that was being posted for me and I was super sad.

I eventually did not sign the contract because the practice really felt immoral to me and recommended my friend instead. While my supervisor was super sad, because they had to go through a long process for that fake job advert, nonetheless he understood my stance and went ahead and called my friend again.

I believe these public institute jobs must post internal hires publicly to comply with certain regulations or something, but the practice is weird.

I’m sorry I do not buy this as a form of “corruption”. Employers aren’t obligated to create perfectly leveled fields for candidates to apply on, especially when candidates are using AI to gin up fake resumes. Perhaps in some fields this is a legal obligation, but I don’t think that is what we’re discussing.

If the world were both good and just then perhaps I could hop on board. But it most certainly isn’t. Frankly, saying so sounds like sour grapes.

Were you actually under-qualified? The stereotype is that many people are not qualified for the jobs they are doing... ;-P

Not big, but certainly bigger. Based on the number of people in the #general channel on Slack, we're ~450 people.

so to be clear, i'm engineering leadership - my exposure is probably greater than most individual contributor engineers but don't take my word as the experience of a dedicated recruiter - they have a much better view of the lay of the land than i do. i just wind up having a certain percentage of hiring/recruiting responsibility as part of my job.

for sure i think that might be a part of it, but i can say from experience that the market is flooded with recruiters, so if capacity was the issue, i'd imagine salaries are depressed right now and tons of talent is available... they could just hire their teams back up.

i genuinely can't explain to you why people aren't getting "no's." i wish i could. it makes me sincerely angry. the way ATSes are usually set up is you have a button to remove them from consideration or put them in some "not at the moment" disposition and every tool i've ever used has an option to automatically send a relevant form email as the result of that action. sending the email would take the same effort as not sending the email.

the only thing i can imagine (and have heard some hr folks say) is that rejecting someone is an action that elicits an emotional response in the person rejected - they might be hurt, they might be offended - and can lead to requests for an explanation why, or also hurt the chance that that person might be interested in working for you in the future. thus, just going dark and acting like "it got lost in the mail" is a way for them to keep the option of hiring you open in the future, or keep you receptive to a response if they reach out 6 months later.

i personally don't know if that's real, and i also don't think it reflects how actual humans respond to being ghosted, but the lack of a rejection email for a role i think is honestly a completely indefensible practice and i do not understand what is going on in the minds of the people who operate that way.

Yeah we refuse the ethics-twisting of suits; that much is certain.

Specifically, I asked a former colleague at Google to to ask one of his connections at the prospective employer to ping HR. Sounds like you thought I was asking my dad's friend to help me or something...?

That's a very odd take, not what I meant at all. All it got me was an interview, and then I went through the standard process, at two different companies.

Self-reply since I can't edit my comment: I used professional connections, not personal ones. And all it did was get me an initial interview vs. being ignored by HR.

>And within a few minutes, got a rejection email.

In some places I think there is an rejection autoresponder.