There’s a lot of ghost jobs. Should probably be illegal to knowingly post a ghost job, with penalties to the tune of “pay a year’s salary to every applicant”
After my resume was rejected without reason by one target employer, i created a false persona with a new email and created a believable resume with ~120% of everything they were looking for on every point. Same rejection email.
Yep, that position is either kept open for a specific candidate (probably already working at the company), or it’s only there for legal requirements…
These days there’s a good chance there isn’t a job, they’re just collecting personal information to sell.
Not necessarily.
While it’s true that the job listing was probably fake, the reason for listing it is often to collect data on the current hiring pool, including how much response can be expected when listing a role with varying salaries. HR departments take this insight back to their current employees and use it to decide who to give raises to and who can be replaced by someone new who will work for less.
When it happened to me recently it was a local community college, definitely not just scraping data. It makes it that much more frustrating too because I thought the interview went well and I will never know what they were looking for that I didn’t have.
That or its a scam to get temporary foreign workers
There is a lot of that. But there is also a lot going on behind the scenes that can cause a posting to be pulled. Particularly as spicy (shitty) as the economy is these days.
I had one last year where the interview process was going very well and then suddenly got an email they were not hiring for this position anymore and planning to replace it with a different role entirely. 2 weeks later I saw on the news that location had half of their staff cut in layoffs…
Ouch, clearly whoever was hiring for that role wasn’t in the loop.
I did a “final” interview, thought I nailed it. The following Monday they reposted the job. Wednesday I met with who would be my boss. Friday was had a job offer. I work here now.
I asked recruiting. He said the ATS reposts job postings that aren’t filled every three weeks and apologized for the anxiety I experienced.
Glad it worked out, but damn that must’ve been a discouraging 3 days.
It very much was. Heart breaking.





