I've been applying constantly, I've got references, I have previous work experience, I got resume help what can I possibly be doing wrong
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this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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I think most job listings are fake. For one, I think most companies set up a job posting service and just ignore it until they actually need someone and don't have any candidates from in-person referrals. So the jobs get posted repeatedly or updated every few months and that's it. None of those positions are actually vacant. It's in the interest of job board companies to make it seem like they have a lot of jobs and information. Part of their model is collecting and selling data about jobs markets. So they're incentivized to have ghost listings everywhere because they don't investigate or discount fake listings. It all helps their internal numbers.
I wouldn't be surprised if the government got lazy and started relying on these job listing companies for market data. Which means there's a big bomb of shit data rolling around in stats, convincing people that there is more activity in the market than there is.
This isn't just a theory.
Many, maaaaany companies openly admit to posting fake job listings, ghost jobs, and your explanations of why they do this are pretty much spot on.
https://www.newsweek.com/ghost-jobs-rise-1924351
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240315-ghost-jobs-digital-job-boards
https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/ghost-job-listings-on-the-rise-how-to-spot-avoid-experts/485494
It is of course difficult to get accurate numbers because of regional / industry variance, which platform are you looking for jobs on, and oh of course those job seeker platforms are highly incentivized to not let their users know how prevalent this is...
But uh yeah, between these 3 fairly recent articles, we've got somewhere between 20% to 60% of companies admitting they post ghost jobs / number of actual job listings that are fake.
Yeah. Its really fucking bad, obviously for job seekers, and also in other ways (which you also correctly surmised) because it makes many metrics other companies and policy planners and econ data all fucked... normally, job openings are... you know, correlated to actual hirings?
Yeah thats all broken now, has been for years.
This phenomenon really kicked in to high gear during and after covid.
In fact, probably a whole lot of the Dems 'the economy is fine actually, stop complaining' rhetoric is because they were too stupid to realize this has been going on and have been relying on bullshit metrics.
Its one thing that they're unrelatable policy nerd wonks who have 0 charisma, can't read the room, nor actually do effective messaging.... its another thing that they are also incompetent data dorks.
(I am an unsociable autist data nerd with a degree in econ and career in data analytics myself... and thus this is personal for me lol)
Linkedin job posts have a free tier which means a posting can be left up indefinitely whether the search is active or not. Indeed posts cost a minimum $5/day, so a given company would likely take the listing down if their search is not active. I've heard that Linkedin is actively resume harvesting, for what reason I don't really know (maybe training some resume AI?) so it could just be a rumor, but I have a chip on my shoulder about Linkedin anyways for trying to make a pay-to-win job search platform.
Whatever you do, don't apply at the individual job board. Go to the company's careers page to see if its even still posted and apply there. For whatever that's worth (not much in my experience).