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.

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'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.