Ghost Jobs Are Haunting the Labor Market

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Do you believe in ghosts because they're not just hanging out in our creepiatics anymore. Ghosts have started to show up in the job market.

Why does it feel like it's absolutely impossible to get a job right now?

Companies are posting more fake job openings. Unfortunately, just like tender, you're getting ghosted.

This means thousands of people, probably you, at some point, will apply to a job online for absolutely no reason and not here back, thinking it's your fault when it's not.

For months now, there have been a bunch of these posts from job seekers complaining about so called ghost jobs. These are jobs that companies advertise and post online, luring in unsuspecting applicants, only to have those jobs disappear without a trace. Ghost jobs have been haunting the job market for a while, but now they seem to be showing

About thirty percent told us they currently have fake job postings. Thirty percent is way too many. Forty percent said to us they did it at some point during this year. That's a lot.

But why would companies do this? Why would they post jobs that don't exist.

Today?

On the show We Go ghost Job Hunting, we take a look at the strange phenomenon, why it's happening, and what all of the recent sightings can tell us about what's going on in the economy. This is the big take. I'm Sarah Holder. To get to the bottom of the ghost jobs mystery, I called up Molly Smith. She's an editor on the US Economy team at Bloomberg who started investigating this trend last year. So, Molly, what is a ghost job?

So think about how you hear about this. A lot in dating, right that people get ghosted on these dating apps, that you maybe reach out to a person and you never hear back from them again. It's kind of like that, except in a job posting. There are these jobs that people are applying to online and are not hearing back from the recruiter. It doesn't seem like there's a real intent to hire, or at least an urgent one. It's

So it's not just that these jobs are ghost jobs, they're literally ghosting applicants.

Yes, exactly.

When Molly first got interested in the phenomenon, she started by looking at the data, in this case government data the tracks how many job openings there are in the economy. In twenty twenty two, the number peaked at twelve million job openings, and it's still elevated, hovering around eight million job openings. But that didn't seem to line up with the vibes, which made people wonder was this number overstating just how strong the labor market was.

We started hearing anecdotally of people who were applying for these jobs and just getting these wild responses. There was somebody we saw in a Reddit thread on jobs saying they had applied to a position for a local grocery store online, got rejected in the same day, and then went into the store to ask what happened, and they said, Oh, we're not actually hiring right now, we're just getting some

So seeing who's out there collecting their resumes but not actually planning on giving a job to anyone until the employer is ready exactly, let's give companies the benefit of the doubt. What are some of the sort of non sinister reasons why they might be posting ghost jobs.

We talked to a lot of recruiters about this, and I think we've all seen what job hostings are like online. It's pretty easy to fire off your resume and send off a ton of applications at want and recruiters will say that they've just been anundated with so many that it isn't humanly possible for them to reply to all the applications that they've received.

Is there also a situation where some of these job sites are leaving up jobs after they've been filled, Like, are sites like LinkedIn and indeed really up to date on what kinds of jobs they're advertising.

So we talked to all of the platforms when we were reporting this story about a year ago, and it's interesting because we heard from Indeed that these ghost postings are not an issue, but then they also said that they remove tens of millions of them every month, So it's like, okay, so which what is it. Some of

But there are also some other reasons being thrown around for why we're seeing these ghost jobs that do seem a little bit shady or at least end up making job applicants feel gas lit, like those recruiters who admitted to posting jobs they weren't actually hiring for just to build up a pool of resumes for the future. That's just one reason to post a job. I asked Molly

So recruiters have told us that some postings need to be available externally as well, in order to ensure that the posting was fair, that they fully vetted a diverse pool of candidates, and that it didn't exclude people because they are external, and that you're really just getting the

I guess that it.

Was posted fairly and given everybody a chance, even if the decision had already been made at that point.

So it's about optics.

Yeah, that's one way of putting it.

We asked Stacy Haller at resume Builder what she'd heard from the hiring managers they surveyed in that may report, and those managers admitted optics are a big part of it.

So what they told us was many of them are posting jobs, so they're on employees feel like, oh, we're hiring more and you won't have to work so hard. The workers are coming into the rescue, or they're telling us they want you to believe the company is growing and expanding when it's not.

Resume builders survey had a limited sample size and it relied on hiring managers willing to self report their reasons for posting ghost jobs. When it comes to official comprehensive data on all this, there's a statistic that the Federal Reserve uses to gauge the strength of the labor market. It's called the Jolts Report for the Job Openings and Labored Turnover Survey. Here's Bloomberg's Molly Smith again.

This is a survey that comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that measures how many job openings there are in the economy in a given month, and a lot of economists we're thinking that it was just overstating how strong the labor market is.

So molly as a self appointed ghost jobs buster called up someone at the Bureau of Labor Statistics who's been working on the jolt survey for over twenty years.

He actually provided a lot of great insight that really stands more to the integrity of the jolt data and saying how vetted these firms are, that this is a survey of twenty one thousand business establishments, it's not scraping online job postings, and that there's also some follow up that's done to see, well, what is the hiring like

But ghost jobs are haunting more than just internet job boards. If they're discouraging for job seekers, they're also frustrating to everyone from policymakers to business owners trying to get a sense of how well the economy is doing. We get into all that after the break, so we know what these ghost jobs mean for everyday workers trying to apply for a job. It means frustration, disappointment, sometimes confusion. But what does the existence of these ghost jobs mean about the job market overall?

Yeah, so it's tough to make an inference about the whole economy from this, but I guess like if we're looking at just the data that's out there, that we can still say that demand for workers is strong, that yes, the unemployment rate has been rising in recent months, but it's at four point one percent that's still historically very low.

The latest job's numbers will be released on Friday, including the unemployment rate, and all eyes will be on it. If that unemployment rate rises like it did last month, it could mean the job market is starting to sour already. We saw some worrying numbers on Thursday. Weekly jobless claims rose more than expected to their highest level in nearly a year. And according to Molly, there's another even wonkier data point economists are paying attention to.

There's this ratio that we look at how how many job openings are there for every unemployed worker aka how many postings are there for every person whom I want a job? And right now that ratio is at one point two. This is more in line with the job market we saw in twenty nineteen, and that it's not the crazy tight job market that we saw in twenty twenty two, where there were two jobs for every unemployed person.

So the job market isn't as tight as it was, which might be a good thing when it comes to reining in wage growth and inflation, but it's not great for workers.

I mean for workers, it can certainly be frustrating because in that environment you were getting these historic wage gains. Pay is not going up by nearly as much now as it was then. But again, it's not like the job market has fallen off a cliff. We've just gone from an extremely, extremely hot one to still a really good one.

What has changed is who has the power in the labor market. It's now shifted back towards employers, and that means fewer people are quitting their jobs. We're no longer living in the great resignation of the pandemic these days, it's more like the Big stay. But Molly says that isn't a reason to be totally alarmed.

I don't want people to be scared to think that this job market is horrible. But the way that I describe it to my friends is that it's not a job market that I would quit right now my job if I had a good gig, because it certainly doesn't look to be one that's favoring the job applicants.

So the job market not horrible, but the slowdown does have everybody's attention. The job market is one of the most important parts of the US economy, and if hiring slows down too much or unemployment rises too fast, it could signal the US economy is heading in a bad direction. The job market came up this week when Federal Reserve cher Jerome Powell answered reporter's questions about whether or not

I mean, workers would love to still be getting the kinds of pay increases that they were a couple of years ago, and to see that they had such bargaining power when it came to negotiating with employers for different kinds of perks, and that's just not the same kind of job market we're in right now. But again, I don't think any of us thought that was a sustainable environment. It was awesome while it lasted. If that was the position you were in, but it just wasn't ever going to last.

Are we at a turning point in the job market right now?

I think that's what everyone's trying to figure out. We've kind of been talking about this with my colleagues of like, right now, we're at what we would call a job market that's running quote at trend. That's kind of normal, you know, so to speak, and that's where you of course would want to be, you know, something that is steady state. So it's really tough right now to say that this is like a bad job market again. It's just softening very very gradually from a really really hot pace.

Now everyone is hoping that as the job market cools off, it doesn't get too cold. But as workers and companies navigate this new normal, where does that leave ghost jobs? Probably not going away anytime soon. Companies have gotten a lot of power back in this job market, and many hiring managers reported to resume Builder that they were happy with the results of their fake job postings.

Fake job postings in ghost jobs isn't new. It's been happening for a while, but it's kind of taken off. So my heart goes to job seekers who now have to understand this part of the process.

So at least for now, it looks like it'll be up to job seekers to try and suss out which job postings are real. That, of course means more work on top of all the work that already goes into looking for a job. What advice do you have for people who want to avoid getting misled or gas lit by a ghost job.

I think one way maybe to do it is to see if the job posting exists on a company's website as well as on a platform, trace it back to the original source, like is it actually there? And if you do have some doubts, you know, maybe if there is a contact to get to the recruiter directly. I think everybody just really wants to know that there's a

This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. This episode was produced by Julia Press. It was fact checked by Adrian Atapia and edited by Stacy Vennicksmith and Aaron Edwards. It was mixed by Blake Naples. Our senior producers are Kim Gettlelson and Naomi Shaven. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Nicole beemsterbor is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks so much for listening. Please follow and review The Big Take wherever you get