WSJ Your Money Briefing - Ghost Jobs: Why Fake Job Listings Are Growing

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

Jobs that companies post, but don’t intend to fill, may account for as much as one in five jobs advertised online, according to an analysis by Greenhouse. Wall Street Journal careers and work bureau chief Lynn Cook joins host Ariana Aspuru to explain the mystery behind so-called ghost jobs.  Sign up for the WSJ's free Markets A.M. newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is sponsored by Northern Trust Wealth Management. There is more to being a successful entrepreneur than just good business practices. What is it about an entrepreneur's childhood that helped fuel their entrepreneurial spirit? What are entrepreneurs doing to cultivate this spirit in their own children and build a legacy beyond their business? Tune in each month to the Road to Why podcast by the Northern Trust Institute, where host Eric Schapea dives deeper with leading entrepreneurs on these topics and more. Find the road to why where you listen to your favorite podcasts. Here's your money briefing for Friday, January 17th. I'm Mariana Espudu for The Wall Street

Journal. A growing number of job seekers who feel like their throwing applications, cover letters, and resumes into a void might be applying to so-called ghost jobs. According to a new analysis from the hiring platform Greenhouse, one in five jobs advertised is fake or not filled. It's almost like there are millions of people who feel like the world is gaslighting them because they read headlines like we have in the Wall Street Journal that says we just had a great jobs report. And it makes people think, well, if everything is so great and people are getting jobs, why

do I feel so stuck? Why am I not getting traction? We'll talk with Wall Street Journal Careers and Work Bureau Chief Lynn Cook after the break. This episode is sponsored by Northern Trust Wealth Management. There is more to being a successful entrepreneur than just good business practices. What is it about an entrepreneur's childhood that helped fuel their entrepreneurial spirit? What are entrepreneurs doing to cultivate this spirit in their own children and build a legacy beyond their business?

Tune in each month to the Road to Why podcast by the Northern Trust Institute, where host Eric Schapea dives deeper with leading entrepreneurs on these topics and more. Find the Road to Why where you listen to your favorite podcasts. If you haven't heard back from that job you applied for months ago, it might not have been a real job posting. Wall Street Journal careers and work bureau chief Lynn Cook joins me. Lynn, what is a ghost job and is it as spooky as it sounds? It is as spooky as it sounds because people who are out there looking for jobs are very spooked by this. It's being defined as the job is advertised. People might be interviewed

for it. They might even have to do take-home assignments or personality tests. But ultimately, the job is never filled. So it looks like there's a job that's open, but then no one ever gets hired. And that's fundamentally what a ghost job is. And a lot of people, millions of people really have experienced this in the last couple of years alone.

Why do companies do this? Why do they post jobs that inevitably don't get filled? That is the number one question people have, and they're very angry, and there are actually a lot of reasons, and some of them are perfectly rational. Somebody leaves a company, you wanna backfill their position,

you talk to HR, you advertise it, and then suddenly someone higher than you says, wait a minute, are we sure we want to backfill that position? As people leave this company, we'll just leave some of these jobs unfilled and save some money. And a lot of companies do that, especially when there's questions about the economy, as there have been for the last year or two, especially in 2024, when the political situation was very much in flux, a lot of companies just said,

we're going into kind of frozen mode till we figure out what's going on here, who's going to win, because whoever took the White House would radically change tariffs and all these other things. So that's actually a very reasonable, logical reason something might be posted and not filled, but it still doesn't feel good if you're the person who applied and never heard back. There are some not so reasonable, some people would say more nefarious things that companies do too. They might decide, well, we don't really know if we want to fill this job, but let's just throw a posting out there and fish for somebody. Maybe there's a perfect candidate that we can't live without, but there might be 800 people applying, and they're taking a look and saying, we're not really committed to filling this role.

That happens too. Then you have things like these third-party staffing agencies that will advertise jobs, sometimes with a company name on it, sometimes with a label that says confidential, implying it might be some huge brand where you might want to work. And turns out there is no job. They're just trying to collect a pool of applicants so they can go to a company and pitch themselves and say, look at this great talent pool we could bring you and you could pick from.

What are some signs that people can look for to identify a ghost job? I wish I could tell you, like, here's the one thing you need to do. There is no one thing you need to do. There is no one thing that's perfectly going to answer this for somebody. But there are a few things to look out for. One, if you see a job posting on someplace like Indeed or LinkedIn, go back to that employer's website and see if it's listed on their own website. Because if it's not, that is the biggest hallmark that it might be a scam, might be fake.

If it is listed on their website, also look at the date. Most job postings, say, posted three days ago or posted more than 30 days ago. If it's been more than 30 days, that's an old posting. Chances are that job has been filled or they're at least very far down the road in the process. The recruiters I talk to say, pick up the phone or email the company, have a little gumption, figure out who the hiring manager is or who a good contact in HR is,

and just call them up or reach out directly and ask. It's work, but if it's a job you actually do care about before you pour blood and sweat and tears into a resume and cover letter and all that, it may be worth it to do that. All of this leads to a lot of frustration on the job seeker end. What did you hear from some of the people you spoke to? I mean, where to start?

There are so many angry and just sad people. It's almost like there are millions of people who feel like the world is gaslighting them because they read headlines like we have in the Wall Street Journal that says, we just had a great jobs report. And it makes people think, well, if everything is so great and people are getting jobs, why do I feel so stuck? Why am I not getting traction? It takes longer to get hired.

And that's because employers start to second guess themselves, do we really need to be spending this money? They start saying, well, if we only need to fill three jobs instead of 30 jobs, we're going to get the perfect people. And we're going to take our time. And instead of interviewing people, you know, for two or three rounds, we're going to make them do eight or nine rounds. And that is also frustrating a lot of people

because they get through this very labor-intensive process and then get, quote-unquote, ghosted. They don't even hear, well, we're not advancing you to the next round. And they're just dropped. And in this era where some companies are ghosting candidates, what can a job seeker do to land a role they have their eyes on? I don't want to discourage people from applying online because there are people who apply online and still get jobs.

So I don't think it's correct to say don't even bother. But if you think you're just going to blitz online job listings and something is just going to come back to you, it's probably not the case. You really need to think about who you know. Ask them if they can be a reference for you. If you know anybody inside the company where you want to work, ask them to go to bat for you. That's Wall Street Journal Careers and Work Bureau Chief Lynn Cook. And that's it for your money briefing. Tomorrow we'll have our weekly Markets wrap-up, What's News in Markets. We're off on Monday for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, but we'll be back on Tuesday. This episode is produced by Jess Jupiter.

I'm your host, Arianna Aspudu. Jessica Fenton and Michael Laval wrote our theme music. Our supervising producer is Melanie Roy. Aisha Amooslem is our development producer. Scott Salloway and Amooslim is our development producer. Scott Salloway and Chris Zinsley are our deputy editors. And Falana Patterson is the Wall Street Journal's head of news audio. Thanks for listening. ["The Daily Show"]

This episode is sponsored by Northern Trust Wealth Management. There is more to being a successful entrepreneur than just good business practices. What is it about an entrepreneur's childhood that helped fuel their entrepreneurial spirit? What are entrepreneurs doing to cultivate this spirit in their own children and build a legacy beyond their business? Tune in each month to the Road to Why podcast by the Northern Trust Institute, where host Eric Schapea dives deeper with leading entrepreneurs on these topics and more.

Find the Road to Why where you listen to your favorite podcasts.