While commentators were singing the praises of America’s labor resiliency, the first stage of the job-hunting meltdown was already showing. That stage came in the form of “ghost jobs,” posts by employers soliciting applications for positions that had already been filled, were never truly intended to be filled or had never really existed at all. While this practice had been expanding for years, its true severity was not well understood until Clarify Capital released a September 2022 survey of 1,045 hiring managers that was the first to focus specifically on the topic of ghost jobs.

Half the managers in question said that one emphatically ambiguous reason they would keep such job listings open indefinitely was because “The company was always open to new people.” That was actually one of the better answers on a list of very bad ones. A tie, at 43%, went to the next most-common responses, “To give the impression that the company is growing” and “To keep current employees motivated.” Perhaps the most infuriating replies came in at 39% and 33%, respectively: “The job was filled” (but the post was left online anyway to keep gathering résumés), and “No reason in particular.”

…Is this for the good of providing another place for employers and future employees to meet? Possibly. Is it because the more raw volume you have, the more traffic is likely to stumble upon your site, and that generates ad revenue? Absolutely.

…This is the latest reality for those searching high and low on the internet for work: not only are plenty of companies tricking you into applying, but so are the people who used to pose as Nigerian princes or strangely-incompetent tech support workers. According to the FTC, there were more than five times as many fake job and “business opportunity” scams in 2023 as there were in 2018, costing victims nearly half a billion dollars in total. Technology is expanding the variety of possible con jobs with every passing year; today, with the rapid advancement and proliferation of AI-fueled deepfakes, not even video calls can provide reliable confirmation of who exactly is on the other end.

…Rather than solving the problems raised by employers’ methods, however, the use of automated job-hunting only served to set off an AI arms race that has no obvious conclusion. ZipRecruiter’s quarterly New Hires Survey reported that in Q1 of this year, more than half of all applicants admitted using AI to assist their efforts. Hiring managers, flooded with more applications than ever before, took the next logical step of seeking out AI that can detect submissions forged by AI. Naturally, prospective employees responded by turning to AI that could defeat AI detectors. Employers moved on to AI that can conduct entire interviews. The applicants can cruise past this hurdle by using specialized AI assistants that provide souped-up answers to an interviewer’s questions in real time. Around and around we go, with no end in sight.

Read more:

Tauke, J. (2024, July 28). Everlasting jobstoppers: How an AI bot-war destroyed the online job market. Salon. https://www.salon.com/2024/07/28/everlasting-jobstoppers-how-an-ai-bot-destroyed-the-online-job-market/