https://archive.ph/HTtBR

I've found that there are two approaches - shotgun and sniper.

Shotgun approach - figure out what software speciality and industry you want (for me, it's Data Engineering in Biotech/anything life sciences), and apply to every single job that you seem fit for. I applied to 20, heard back from 2-3.

Sniper approach - if you find a job that you actually really want, work your network as hard as you can. Find a friend who is connected with the company, ask them to make an introduction. Find random people at the company, LinkedIn message the hiring manager, do anything you can to get an interview. Once you get an interview, you have a chance, but the hard part is getting the interview.

This has been true since at least June of last year, and has obviously accelerated and expanded.

I’m not sure why they think it’s a good idea. I’ve now got a pretty hefty list of companies I won’t work for, will recommend people I know don’t work for, and will recommend against doing business with (as customer or partner) based solely on disrespectful and deceitful practices like this.

I guess that’s irrelevant to most of them, but that’s the world I suppose.

There's another reason for these "ghost jobs" that isn't even mentioned here: bypassing employment regulations against wage dumping.

For H1B (US) and most of EU worker visa, employers have to prove that they had open positions for domestic candidates that they couldn't fill in a reasonable time - so they keep up these postings and reject/frustrate domestic applications for long enough to hire someone from overseas at barely above minimum wage.

On top of that... some companies have burned the bridge so far by exploiting their employees that they legitimately can't find anyone willing to work there any more.

Anecdote: I have 9 years of solid tech experience and applied to ~20 open roles last month. So far I have only heard back from 1 of those recruiters. Companies that are hiring right now are filling roles primarily through employee referral, so work your network.

On the flip-side to what’s described in this article (companies posting listings for jobs that don’t exist), our company doesn’t hire often and has incessant issues with bots picking up & re-hosting our old job listings from years prior.

We must get 15-20 mails a week in regards to a re-posted listing for a position that hasn’t been open since last spring.

Or worse, go to an interview, they ask you how to fix a specific problem, never hear from them again. Later find out that they had no openings, just wanted the problem solved.

Even worse, I've had two instances in the past few months of going through the entire interview process, being told that they just need to make the final decision or put together an offer, and then having the job disappear. One of those postings is still up...

" One-third of the managers who said they advertised jobs they weren’t trying to fill said they kept the listings up to placate overworked employees."

"placate overworked employees". Thats a funny way of saying "lying to keep exploiting overworked employees". But is the Wall Street Journal, what could we expect?

> I first thought of it as an anomaly, and now I see it as a trend

This has been going on for decades. I was complaining about it back in the year 2001. It is not new.

I’ve also read that some companies do this (overprovision job listings and make them difficult / impossible to match) to prove the need for H1B visas, presumably to open the market up to cheaper employees.

Not discussed in the article: The “resume firewall” (resume filtering software) also seems to be a significant hurdle for applicants and likely causes misallocation of hiring resources if it is misconfigured for reasonable applicants. It’s possible that some positions actually exist and might match listings, but no applicants can manage to “press all the right buttons” to get interviewed.

Here's the blog post giving a little more detail about the survey cited in the article:

https://clarifycapital.com/job-seekers-beware-of-ghost-jobs-...

The methodology here is still not clear - how did you source "managers involved in the hiring process", and how did you find 1045 of them over two days - but it provides some information that at least puts the article in a little bit more context. The "one third" of managers saying that they post fake jobs to trick employees was in response to a multi-select question where the next closest reason was literally "no reason in particular".

It could be a honey trap, to identify potential competitors, or it could be used to falsely imply said company is working on something they are not, so as to distract there competition. In either case it's clearly an intelligence operation.

I've scraped job listings for several companies, organizations and governments for years. It's a wealth of information that gives you insights into what a company is doing, what it values and where it may be going.

None of this is new. This was happening to me back in 2018.

At this point I'm no longer willing to deal with job postings because I can't trust anything I see on the internet. I'd rather just put up a "situation wanted" post with a "principals only" warning and see if waiting for people to reach out to me is really that much worse than reaching out to businesses.

[flagged]