Because the definition of a “ghost job” starts falling apart when you look closely at the numbers. A company that hires multiple people under a single generic listing like “Senior Software Engineer” would be classified as a ghost job, despite actually producing more hires than job listings. It would be annoying as hell if there was a law dictating that we had to post 50 separate job listings every time we wanted to hire 50 people and then carefully assign candidates to the right one so we didn’t accidentally trigger some ghost job law.

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bluefirebrand 20 hours ago | parent [-]

You could just state "we are hiring 50 people for this position" if you really are hiring 50 of the exact same role. Is there any value for posting 50 different identical job listings?

	▲	Aurornis 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The fallacy at play is thinking that every company knows exactly how many people will be hired. Some times we hire by budget: The department has $X million to expand headcount and how fast it goes depends on the seniority and skill level of the applicants we get. Or maybe the first few people we hire are moving faster than expected so we raise the bar and start being more selective to match the people we just hired. There are infinite reasons that a job listing may not get marked as filled within a short timeframe used in these studies. I know some people want strict requirements or things like fining companies who don’t hire someone in time, but the majority of postings that fit this definition are not “ghost jobs”.