Opinion: ‘Ghost jobs,’ where companies put up ads but don’t actually want to hire anyone

Vass Bednar is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail and host of the podcast Lately. She is the executive director of McMaster University’s master of public policy program and co-author of The Big Fix.

It is now widely accepted that much of what we see online nowadays is fake: “slop” from synthetic media, chatter from bots intended to seem like it’s from humans, strange AI-generated clickbait on Facebook and products for sale that are of much lower-quality than depicted. This pervasive fakery, now a hallmark of our digital age, is typically found on social-media sites and a certain online search bar.

But now it’s spilling over into the labour market. While there has been an occasional focus on prospective or new hires ghosting employers, far less attention has been paid to positions being advertised that don’t actually exist. These are called “ghost jobs,” and they are demoralizing and disillusioning job seekers.

Earlier this month, Klarna’s chief executive officer, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, admitted that the fintech company had stopped hiring, but still advertises open positions. Posting a mirage of a vacancy allows a company to project success and hint at growth at the expense of people’s time, aspirations and emotional energy. Worse, firms engaged in this kind of tactic can surreptitiously signal to current employees that they are imminently replaceable.

Back in February, it was reported that mentions of recruiters “ghosting” job applicants have more than doubled since before the pandemic. Similar to these phantom positions, sometimes companies advertise the same role with different titles as a sort of A/B test for search engine optimization, adding another layer of cynicism to the hiring process.

Posting a position when there may be an internally preferred candidate is one thing, and totally pretending that you’ll actually hire someone is another. Duping people into thinking that they have a shot at working somewhere may be a contributor to the complicated concept of the “vibecession,” whereby there is a dissonance between the numbers that describe the health of the economy and how people actually feel about it.

The reality is that job hunting is getting worse. On top of that, Canada’s unemployment rate is the highest it’s been since January, 2017 (excluding 2020 and 2021, as Statistics Canada does).

That is what makes fake job posting a frustrating illusion with broader implications of disillusion and resentment. They waste people’s time, get their hopes up and fuel distrust. Such phantom listings ghost an applicant before they even get to the interview. They are unethical, and at worst, a form of applicant abuse that erodes trust between workers and firms.

The digitization of the labour market has been a boon for employees and applicants, as a much wider pool of openings can be accessed around the clock, and hybrid and work-from-home options have dropped the constraint of geography that may have previously moderated applications. This dynamic has put huge pressure on entry-level roles that are flooded with applicants and facilitated the introduction of AI-screening tools that sleuth for keywords as a filtering process.

Job seekers, weary of pouring their energy into futile applications, are starting to push back. One example is a crowdsourced document, the Ghost Job Red Flag List, that alphabetically lists firms that are posting roles online “for their own benefit with no intention of hiring.” While this is a somewhat productive and no doubt cathartic expression of the rejection fatigue so many are feeling, it doesn’t seem to have stopped HR departments from perpetuating the charade.

Some experts have suggested that companies should label these kinds of ads as being “expressions of interest” for potential jobs, ensuring transparency and honesty in the hiring process. Such an approach could better manage candidate expectations and help to restore trust in the recruitment ecosystem.

Just like messaging an avatar on a dating app, applying to a job involves a certain mix of bravery, hope and vulnerability. But there is growing evidence that applicants are being cat-fished in a stupid scam. And in the way that Generation X is breaking up with dating apps, the kayfabe of job searching could be the next scheme they become exhausted with and reject entirely.

We should do a little more to make ghost jobs actually disappear.