That statistic that 1 in 5 job listings might be a “ghost job” comes from a company developing application tracking systems (Greenhouse) and as far as I can tell they included every listing on their website that wasn’t eventually marked as hired in their system. So a company that wanted to hire multiple people under the same application, choosing to leave it open, would be classified as a ghost job.

Most tech companies I worked for would have had our common hiring listings like “Senior Software Engineer” flagged as ghost jobs under this system. I think they wanted to use this report to get their name out, and it’s working because journalists like the WSJ and even politicians are now parading their report around.

The Greenhouse website looks like exactly the kind of ATS you don’t want. The top feature I see on their website is “Voice AI” which will perform an AI voice interview with the candidate for you.

I don’t want anything to do with that company and I don’t trust their numbers either.

The opposite can also be true. Just because a position was marked as “hired” doesn’t mean anyone was actually hired.

Good to be skeptical. Remember, though, that there is zero cost to displaying ads. That means they get bundled at places like indeed. If you’re HR and have 3 openings, but have 4 ads you can run for less than the price of 3… Personally, I might run an ad for some kind of triple threat that has no chance of finding someone.

Also, the cost of screening ad responses is near zero compared to 30 years ago.

So we have economics that encourages ghost job listings. Personally I’d like to see big taxes on job postings scaling for company size, maybe duration too. Would solve this particular problem.

Rather sad to see them go down that path, because Greenhouse used to be a pretty good system. For an applicant it was reasonably low-friction[ß] and for the company doing the hiring it made their internal hiring process steps very smooth indeed. I have fond memories of being on the business end of Greenhouse when hiring and interviewing people.

That they have stooped to dodgy marketing with bad and/or massaged statistics is telling. To think that a "Voice AI" interview would be anything other than demeaning is beyond tone deafness.

ß: someone early on in the company's history must have realised that zero-friction application submissions were a terrible idea. You want candidates who at least had to go through one step on their own to submit their CV - otherwise you get flooded by LI/Indeed style spam typhoons and other eldritch horrors.

What a naive attitude. There are companies who have the same jobs posted for years without hiring anybody. This is easy to find, using search engine caches.

Also normal discussion with HR persons, will quickly make realize most job posts are fake. They just have it open in case "the right candidate comes along..."

And most important you have payrolls dat from companies like ADP, and internal data from aggregators like Indeed.

About 3 in 5 jobs are ghost.