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.

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.