Somewhere right now a young applicant is tailoring a cover letter for a job that does not exist. Not a scam posted by criminals: a posting placed by a legitimate company, with a real logo and a careers-page URL, for a role it has no intention of filling. The industry term is ghost jobs, and the practice has moved from open secret to measured phenomenon.
A 2024 survey of hiring managers reported by Newsweek found that roughly three in ten job listings posted online were for roles that did not exist or that the company had no real intention of hiring for; 39 percent of hiring managers across nearly 650 companies said their organization had posted fake jobs within the past year. An earlier survey by Clarify Capital in 2023 found half of hiring managers keeping postings open to maintain a talent pool for future hiring. The reasons given elsewhere in the 2024 survey are more corrosive than the practice itself: majorities of the companies posting ghost jobs claimed benefits including improved employee morale, the postings serving as a signal to overworked staff that help was on the way, when it was not. And 70 percent of the surveyed managers found the practice acceptable.
Note who meets these postings first. In the same survey, ghost listings were most common at entry and mid level. The cohort with the least market knowledge and the thinnest savings absorbs the most fabricated hope.
The asymmetry, stated plainly
Consider what the hiring process demands of the applicant: verified employment history, references who will vouch, portfolios, sometimes unpaid test work, and consequences (blacklisting, rescinded offers) for any embellishment discovered. The process treats candidate honesty as sacred. The same process now includes, on the employer's side, a documented tolerance for publishing fictional openings, ignoring applications by design, and letting an algorithmically generated silence do the rejecting.
An applicant who invented a job on their résumé would be committing fraud. A company that invents a job on its careers page is doing pipeline development.
This asymmetry teaches faster than any onboarding deck. A generation's first sustained contact with employers is the application process; if that process is 30 percent fiction, the lesson learned is that stated openings, like stated values, are marketing. Employers then meet these same young workers six months later and lament that they seem transactional and distrustful, as though the distrust were imported from their phones rather than manufactured by the funnel.
Honesty as a two-sided screen
There is a practical inversion available to candidates: interview the employer's honesty the way employers interview yours. Ricardo Semler has described a version of this from the other side of the table. At Semco, where a fixed share of each unit's profit went to the people who produced it and the books were open for anyone to check the math, the suggested interview test for any company making similar claims was a single question: what percentage of last year's profit went to non-executives? A company that publishes numbers can answer. A company that publishes vibes cannot.
The same test generalizes to hiring itself. How many roles did you post last year, and how many did you fill? How long has this listing been open? Who was the last person hired through this posting? Employers find these questions impertinent, which is diagnostic: the questions are only uncomfortable where the answers are.
What the collapse costs the employer
The ghost-job equilibrium is not stable, because trust in a market is a commons. Applicants have already responded to fictional postings with fictional effort: mass-generated applications, AI-written cover letters, the same automation that firms use to reject candidates now used to apply to them. Recruiters complain of a flood of low-intent applications; much of that flood is the rational response to low-intent postings. Each side is now spamming the other and calling it a talent shortage.
The exit from this equilibrium is boring and available: post only real roles, close filled ones, tell applicants where they stand. Firms that do this will find it has become a competitive advantage, which is itself the indictment; honesty about openings used to be the floor. The generational contract is renegotiated at every point of contact, and the job posting is the first clause a young worker ever reads. Right now, three times in ten, that clause is a lie, published by the party that will later wonder why nobody believes its mission statement.
Sources
- Newsweek, reporting ResumeBuilder survey of hiring managers (2024). "Ghost jobs" are on the rise. Roughly 3 in 10 online listings are for roles that don't exist or won't be filled; 39% of hiring managers (≈650 companies) admitted posting fake jobs in the past year; 70% found the practice acceptable. https://www.newsweek.com/ghost-jobs-rise-1924351
- Clarify Capital survey of 1,000 hiring managers (2023, cited in the same Newsweek report). 50% said they keep postings open to maintain a talent pool for future hiring. https://www.newsweek.com/ghost-jobs-rise-1924351