The Rise of Ghost Jobs in Today's Labor Market

Ghost jobs are misleading job postings that create confusion in the labor market, frustrating job seekers and obscuring hiring intentions.

### The Rise of Ghost Jobs: Understanding the Job Market's Illusions
* 👤  Meet John Doe, a young job seeker who feels **frustrated** after applying for a position that remains **unfilled and is relisted**, a common experience among many applicants today.
* 📉  A recent survey revealed that **40% of companies posted fake job listings** in 2024, indicating a significant rise in "**ghost jobs**," which are roles that exist online but are not actually being filled.
* 🔍  Ghost jobs are not scams; they come from legitimate companies that may not be hiring for the role at the moment due to **budget cuts or future hiring plans**, contributing to a **decline in the hire-to-job posting ratio**.
* 📊  Over the past five years, the rate of hires per 10 job postings has **halved**, dropping from **eight to four**, which muddles the job market's signals and creates **confusion for job seekers**.
* 📈  Despite a healthy overall labor market with payrolls **up by 170,000** in the last three months, many workers are struggling to find jobs, highlighting a **disconnect between statistics and real-life experiences**.
* 💼  Job seekers can identify ghost jobs by looking for signs such as **prolonged posting durations** and **vague job titles**, making it challenging to discern which listings are genuine.
* 🔗  Job posting platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed are urged to take responsibility for ghost jobs by implementing **better verification processes** and being **transparent about job listing durations**.
* ⚖️  Ultimately, the prevalence of ghost jobs reflects a labor market that is currently **not friendly to job seekers**, as companies navigate a **legal gray area** to attract talent without the intention to hire immediately.

Meet John Doe. He's in his early 20s and eager to jump into the workforce. He sees a job listing that looks perfect to him. So he brushes up his resume. He writes an awesome cover letter, applies, and then waits and waits. So after a month or so, he actually sees the same job posting relisted, which makes him super frustrated. John isn't alone. Many people are frustrated by applying to these kinds of jobs that seem to have no intention of hiring anyone. If you are in the position of trying to find a new job, of course, you don't want to waste your time applying for these ghost jobs. But it turns out, all those open job postings that you see online might not even be real. Ghost jobs are a phenomenon that has existed for a long time, but they've come to light much more in recent years, and they've become much more of a significant issue in the job

market. Four in 10 companies posted fake job listings in 2024, and three in 10 are currently advertising for a role that isn't real, according to a May survey from Resume Builder. The rise of ghost job posting definitely points to a cooling in the economy. We are seeing that employers are more hesitant to make that hire, and it just points to the fact that demand for talent is slowing down. Here's why ghost jobs are on the rise. Ghost jobs are actually not scams. They're from real companies, but they are openings that don't actually exist. That company is not actually hiring for that role at this moment in time. They might be interested in hiring for that role in the future, or maybe they were hiring for it, but due to budget cuts, those roles were closed or put on hold. A ghost job is essentially a job that remains open online and never gets filled. The occurrence of ghost jobs has

increased quite dramatically over the past five years. We're seeing a decline in the rate of hires to job postings, and that rate has basically halved over the past five years. So, whereas in 2019 we saw eight hires per 10 job postings, we are now seeing four hires per 10 job postings, which, of course, is quite a dramatic drop. This is a pretty worrying development because it just softens the signal of what a job posting really means and whether there is truly a hiring intention behind that from the employer point of view. I think we're seeing a lot of ghost jobs lately for the same reason that I think a lot of people keep their Tinder profiles up, even if they're not actively looking for a relationship. It's because we like to keep our options open for, you know, whether it's a good or a bad thing. Companies are no different. Companies know that talent is not always available.

when they are ready to hire, so they want to be able to attract applications from potentially great candidates, even if they're not right now able to give that person a job. Because of market visibility, if they are regularly listing their job openings, that will enhance a company's image, potentially showing them as a growing and thriving organization, and maybe that's a signal to investors or clients or competitors that their company is expanding the brand perception. Market research. Some companies, they have no idea what is the salary, what are the skill sets and demands, so they probably are posting to get that data. What are you expecting as a salary if you want to be in that role in this industry. So that's why they're collecting those data, so that they can build a total compensation package and build the key performance indicator and net promoter scores for the companies if they really don't know how the recruiting works. So maybe it's

for market insights to go into the future, but that does not benefit job seekers at all. That's such a bad employer branding. The US job market significantly slowed in July 2024. However, if you look at the overall labor market, it's still healthy. It's no question. This report came in cooler than expected, but over the past three months, payrolls are up 170,000. That's certainly a good enough clip to keep the labor market healthy. According to June's job openings and labor turnover survey, commonly known as JOLTS, the number of unemployed persons per job opening stands at 0.8, indicating a tight labor market. Job openings in labor turnover known as JOLTS. JOLTS coming in near expectations, 8,184,000. Actually, that's better than expectations. Despite a tight labor market, on paper, many workers are still

struggling to find jobs, indicating a disconnect between the data and the real-life experiences of job seekers. The rise of ghost jobs is muddying the jobs report. It's making it harder for the Fed to make decisions and understand what the labor market looks like. Anecdotally, people will tell you that it's very tough out there. We've talked about this notion of unhireables. People who are out of work, got laid off, and just can't find a job. They can't buy an interview. There are people coming out of college, and they're finding that they are putting out 500 - 800 - 1000 applications, and they can't get an interview, let alone a job. And yet, when you look at the base numbers on the job boards, it would seem like we're in an incredibly robust hiring market, and those ghost jobs are creating a fake perception, and

no one knows how fake that perception is. And the Fed and economists are trying to understand what's real and what isn't, and they haven't yet figured out the silver bullet to understand. Over the past decade, JOLTS shows a marked increase in job openings for any given level of unemployment, and this is making people think, Oh, well, maybe these openings aren't real openings. I would push back against that a little bit, because JOLTS specifically asks employers to report only jobs that they could fill within the next 30 days. Most ghost jobs, that is, jobs that employers don't intend to fill that soon or ever, either intentionally or by mistake, most of those shouldn't appear in JOLTS at all. The Bureau of Labor Statistics stated that the JOLTS program doesn't use job listings for estimating job openings. While

familiar with the term ghost jobs, the program believes it does not have any data related to the phenomenon. It's really hard as a job seeker to spot a ghost job. There are some signs. If you look at a job and you see that it's been open for over a month. Sometimes it might say it's been open for many months. Some of the job boards will give an indication of how many people have applied for a job. And so if you see that a job has been open for 90 days and 10,000 people have applied, putting your application in your 10,001 year a number, it's probably a ghost job. So my firm uncovered that there's 1.7 million job openings on LinkedIn in 2023 as of the date of the article, that were older than a month, and these we've determined to be potential ghost jobs. They're not necessarily ghost jobs. And that

is the difficulty with ghost jobs is that they're hard to fully prove. So there are ghost jobs out there for sure, they're rising and they're a problem, but it's not always easy to completely pin them down, and companies don't want to admit that they're posting ghost jobs because it looks bad for them. It's anti-employee, it's anti-job seeker, and it's very pro-company. So they want to be careful about that, so they're not going to openly admit that they're posting ghost jobs. Another red flag for a job posting that's potentially a ghost job is when it's a vague job title. So for example, if they say we're looking for a Video Superstar, or we're looking for a Project Manager Superstar, or they use some sort of identification that doesn't really say much, it could be an indication that they are just keeping a job opening available.

so they can attract talent and get a nice little pool of potential talent that they can pull from when and if they do need to hire. Job boards are the most popular places for job seekers to find opportunities. Indeed, ZipRecruiter, and LinkedIn are among the most popular job boards in the US. However, there's growing concern that some of these platforms aren't doing enough to address the issue of fake job postings. Job posting platforms can address ghost jobs. The first line of addressing them is taking full responsibility for them, even if they're not the ones posting it. That's totally understandable, but it's still their site. It's their platform, and I believe they should take 100% responsibility. They should be verifying, you know, they could implement an enhanced job post verification method. So potentially, they're reaching out to multiple people in the hiring process, an HR person, a

hiring manager or verifying that person via social media. I would love to see these job posting sites like LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, and Indeed hold companies a little bit more accountable for being transparent about how long the listings have been up and how recently the position was hired for. If they're going to continue to keep the listing up, they should have options somewhere to say, We recently hired this position. You can keep it up at that point, you can make it clear that, Hey, if you think you're a good fit, go ahead and drop your application. Maybe, if this doesn't work out, we'll reach back out to you. CNBC reached out to a few major job posting platforms for comment. LinkedIn stated that their job posting policy requires posts to be genuine and accurate, and they're removed after six months. Indeed noted that some postings stay active

during ongoing searches or continuous hiring. And ZipRecruiter stated that ghost jobs are prohibited under their policies. At the end of the day, when it comes to ghost jobs, I mean, companies got to do what they got to do, and I think they're willing to take that reputational risk if it means they can attract the best talent and do what's best for them at the end of the day. What ghost jobs speak about the labor market is that it's not currently friendly to job seekers, and companies are taking advantage of the labor market. They're finding this opening that's this legal gray area, and they're taking advantage of it, and they don't need to be nice to job seekers, because they think that they owe them nothing, and they think that they'll be able to push the cost of their own employees down with this, because there's a lot of sentiment online about it.

being impossible to find a job right now. So why am I gonna leave my job and try to find another job? So I think what this might lead to, though, is job seekers doing the same thing to companies like keeping the doors open for themselves and looking for jobs the entire time they're working and having many recruitment contacts, because that's what companies are doing. They're always looking for the next step and they're worried about themselves. Then that's going to create that same sentiment with employees. Right now, even JOLTS is giving us some confusing signals. The discussion about ghost jobs is one of the ways that the financial community is trying to understand these trends. Unfortunately, we probably won't know whether these really are permanent or temporary changes in the prevalence of ghost jobs until after this cycle is over, and the more academic economists sit there and really parse the data out. But right now, what we

have is a lot of hypotheses coming out of the people who are watching the data very closely. Ghost jobs is one interesting potential explanation for some of the more confusing patterns that we're seeing in the labor market.

What The Rise Of Fake Job Listings Says About The Job Market

Welcome to the official YouTube channel for CNBC. From 'Wall Street' to 'Main Street' to award winning original documentaries and Reality TV series, CNBC has you covered. Experience special sneak peeks of your favorite shows, exclusive video and more.

For real-time news updates from around the world, visit: http://www.cnbc.com

For CNBC's primetime TV lineup, visit http://tv.cnbc.com

For CNBC's International YouTube channel, visit: http://www.youtube.com/cnbcinternational

CNBC

Ghost jobs, or fake job listings, are a growing phenomenon, with 40% of companies posting them in 2024.

These openings often belong to real companies but are not actively hiring, leading to frustration for job seekers.

The decline in the rate of hires to job postings has halved over the past five years, raising concerns about the true intention behind job listings.

The Complexities of Job Hiring and Market Dynamics

Companies post job openings to attract potential candidates and enhance their image, even if they can't offer immediate jobs.

Market research is a key reason for these postings, as companies seek data on salaries and skill demands to build compensation packages.

Despite a healthy overall labor market, many workers struggle to find jobs, creating a disconnect between job data and real-life experiences, while the rise of ghost jobs complicates the job market perception.

The perception of job openings may be misleading, with JOLTS data showing a marked increase in openings despite unemployment levels.

The program's focus on jobs that need to be filled within 30 days makes it unlikely for ghost jobs to be reported.

Signs of potential ghost jobs include long open durations, high application numbers, and vague job titles, making them difficult for job seekers to identify.

The Issue of Ghost Jobs in Job Posting Platforms

Job boards like Indeed, ZipRecruiter, and LinkedIn are popular for job seekers, but there's concern about fake job postings.

These platforms should take responsibility for ghost jobs and implement enhanced verification methods.

Companies are using ghost jobs to attract talent and take advantage of the labor market, leaving job seekers in a challenging position.

The Impact of Job Seeking Behavior on the Labor Market

Job seekers are increasingly keeping their options open while working, mirroring companies' behavior in seeking new talent.

The JOLTS data is providing confusing signals about job trends, including the rise of ghost jobs.

The true impact of ghost jobs on the labor market may not be clear until after the current cycle is over, leading to various hypotheses from economists.