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

Hang on a minute. There is absolutely nothing in this research that measures the accuracy of this approach. A user saying "I was ghosted" is not, to my mind, proof of anything.

Job seekers almost never actually know if the job was real or not, so it's hard to see how Glassdoor reviews can ever provide the insight this work is looking for.

I do believe that "ghost" jobs exist, often for H1B purposes, but I don't think this work proves it.

Hail to you, person who also reads studies.

The methodology is pretty weak.

Right! Everyone in this thread is discussing it as if it’s a proven fact when the approach is extremely sketchy. Based on this I would say 20% is a generous upper bound at most.

If I'm understanding this right, the author gave ChatGPT-4o 2000 reviews and asks it "Are you 90% sure that this is a ghost job". Then, the author used those as labeled examples, trained a BERT model to predict the ChatGPT decision, and then applied the BERT model to the rest of the dataset. I guess this is cool, but if the goal is to pinpoint some percentage of ghost jobs overall I'm very skeptical

(it's a bit disappointing that 200 comments into this thread there was only a single mention of either "BERT" or "ChatGPT" per ctrl-f)

There's also no historical baseline of comparison. I know for a fact that ghost jobs have existed for a long time. I don't see any evidence they are more prevalent now than 10 or 20 years ago.

While I'm disappointed at the scientific merits of the paper, I'm glad it was posted here which invited discussion on this topic. Someone feeling frustrated with their job app right now might find a speculative answer here.

(Currently waiting for "final decision" on 2 interviews which went well, but after 3 weeks, I'm starting to feel they're ghosting me)

Yeah, but it looks official and confirmed my preexisting bias. So it's correct.

The confirmation bias is certainly strong in many of the comments here, be cautious of accepting an explanation that makes you feel better over the alternatives

From the other side, they may be evaluating more candidates, hoping for a better fit. From the same side, I accepted an offer with another company after waiting for weeks for Google to respond, only to have them finally get back a couple days later. Someone dropped the ball on their end. Another interesting aspect is that I was laid off 4 weeks into my new job, only to then be hired by the team I was embedded with 2 weeks later, which goes to show you that large corps can be disorganized, so while one team is trying to hire to meet demand, the larger org is planning cuts to the workforce without giving them the heads up, while another part of the org is expanding with permission

the naive keyword search shows 1.6%, the GPT-then-BERT shows 21%, there's a 50% estimate from the literature

confounders abound, of course, but the proposed mechanism and other aspects all make sense

can you expand on that? which parts are ok, which are bad?

and more importantly is it possible to do better with the available resources available to a "regular" researcher?

is there even some hard data on ghost job openings? (ie. from court cases or labor board cases or ...?)