Ghosts!
(Est. Reading Time: 18 min) (Don't have time to read? Listen to the Podcast version)
It is a quiet Monday evening, and you are up late, worried about finding your next job. Everyone else is asleep, the house is a little dark, and you are curled up under a blanket and cozy on your sofa doing one of your least favorite pastimes: job searching. When all of a sudden, you hear absolutely nothing. Crickets. Wait, what kind of ghost story is this? Hold on, it gets scarier. You don't hear anything for days, weeks, even months. You come to realize you are never going to hear anything at all! You've been ghosted! AHHHHHH! Unfortunately, if you have experienced this, you are not alone.
A ghost job is a job that a company posts with the intention of never hiring for the role. Ghost jobs quite often lead to ghosting, which refers to never hearing back from a company after applying or interviewing. To be fair, there are ghost jobs that you actually hear back from, too. "Although your work history was impressive, after careful consideration, it has been determined that we will be pursuing other candidates that are a closer match to our current needs." Does that sound familiar? It's completely fair that you could be receiving that rejection email after someone carefully reviewed your resume, but had several other candidates, and it's honest. But it's so "standardized" and how do you really know? Well, have you ever applied for a job online at an hour well outside standard business hours, and within minutes received a rejection like that? Or received several rejections all at once at the start of a business day? If so, you have likely not had your resume read by a human, and you might even have been ghosted.
Ghosting is rampant. I've applied to well over 1,000 jobs in the last year, and I have just over 100 actual decision replies, all of which are cookie cutter rejections. But a bigger problem is ghost jobs. Ghost jobs have no intention of hiring anyone, so you could understand why they never send any further correspondence. Moreover, some companies post ghost job openings to project growth or gather resumes for future use, rather than to fill immediate vacancies. This practice can mislead us job seekers and inflate the perceived demand for certain roles.
Real quick side tangent while I am covering some terms. I mention the big tech giants throughout this post, so you should know what I am talking about when I use these acronyms. FAANG is outdated and stands for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google., MAANG is a patch to replace Facebook with Meta. But these are not the only tech giants messing up the tech industry for the rest of us. So, from now on, I'm calling them by the acronym MANGOMAN and bolding this term in this post, which stands for Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, Google, Open AI, Meta, Apple, and Netflix. It's also more perfect than you think to replace the old acronym, because of this 2020 Urban Dictionary explanation of a Mango Man. Feel free to use that and help it get popular, and I'd appreciate the link back if you do.
To start, pull up your preferred search engine or LLM, and look up the average salary for a Senior Software Engineer today. Then browse a couple software engineering jobs boards until you find two somewhat identical roles with two different companies. What do you notice? Ranges. Very wide ranges. For example, I do this often, and a few months ago, I saw two different companies looking to hire a Senior Software Engineer full-time with 10+ years of experience and a master's degree. One company was offering $110k-$150k base pay and the other was offering $170k to $240k. Both jobs were posted during the same time, mentioning the same tech stacks. Both were on-site roles located in downtown Boston, which I should point out is one of the most expensive cities by cost of living in the United States.
To come up with salaries like that, companies guess based on numbers gleaned by skimming other job listings. Except, no one else also has any real clue what to pay industry experts, either. Or they try to follow what the industry giants are doing. Some companies even conduct expensive and formal compensation analyses or use industry salary surveys to figure pay rates out, except all of those sources get their pay data from all the same job postings you see on job boards. Doesn't that sound just a little flawed and prone to erroneous data? How do they even know if the jobs they are analyzing are even real and not ghost jobs to begin with? They guess. Really "smart" engineers come up with algorithms to abstract the wholesome values from all this data. But I say really "smart" with quotes because that's hard to prove given the state of job postings we still see all over the place today.
Now, back in the "FAANG/MAANG" days before mainstream LLM adoption, you know, like 3 or more years ago, the massive tech companies would race each other to hire talent straight out of prestigious schools at the Senior level and $300k total compensation. And they did that just to prevent the competition from hiring them. The rest of the world was hiring talented software engineers with top tier compensation packages to keep up with the super high demand, too. Even if a candidate's resume was wild and non-standard, they likely were looked at as creative, original, and were wildly successful.
Then, starting around the middle of 2022, the MANGOMAN companies and other tech companies started doing these strategic record-setting mass layoffs targeting their highest paid talent. Now most of them are actually hiring new and cheaper talent in an effort to replace a lot of the talent they axed. When the big tech giants do anything, rest of the tech industry companies do their best to copy them. Even though a few hundred thousand people lost their jobs to layoffs in the last few years, including me, this is still a growing tech industry, and those affected by layoffs are only a small fraction of the whole global supply of tech workers. Yet, we humans blew it way out of proportion and panic has been sweeping the job market citing an end to software engineering as we know it. Let me be clear, though we have been on a downward hiring trend in 2023 and 2024, the tech sector hiring is starting to hold steady and may even show positive growth like we are used to seeing.
Right now, though, hiring mangers are now more dumbfounded than they have ever been at what to actually offer and pay anyone they hire, with some of the most dynamic salary ranges for tech workers ever seen. Add a recession-leaning volatile economy to that mix and companies are having to really be careful about how much they offer new hires. Not to mention that no one wants to hire junior or mid level software engineers because the great AI hype has been screaming bogus claims at us that LLMs are going to replace software engineers. Vibe coding is being swung around like it's the only way to write code now, and startups are being created to use LLMs to cheat on technical interview code challenges. All these factors contribute to creating really inconsistent job applications that are asking for discount unicorns and other nonsense.
What this means is that companies now are amplifying their efforts to farm hiring data with ghost job postings. They aggregate the applicant data from the ghost jobs to derive a lot of their hiring data. Then, they use that data to decide what to pay people, or even who to lay off. This isn't new, though. Ghost jobs have been a tool used by HR departments for a long time, but with the increased supply of unemployed tech workers and the higher than normal number of ghost jobs, people are really starting to notice. Couple that with the sloppy way ATS (Applicant Tracking System) platforms are mysteriously handling submitted applications from the perspective of the candidate, and you have a lot of angry job hunters out there right now.
But if companies are losing potential candidates from the fallout of these ghost jobs and hiring practices, why are they using these ATS platforms? Not to mention, companies pay out the wazoo for ATS platforms. That's because any decent data could improve hiring decisions at a company in significant cost saving ways. The catch, though, is its decent data at best. That's because, in order to get any usable data from an ATS platform, it has to correctly parse the wide world of creative resumes, which no one knows on the candidate side if it successfully parses their resumes. But assuming they do correctly parse 95% of the resumes, you also have to realize the data is limited in scope to just the instance of the ATS platform the company is using. That means, in that data, they end up only looking at data based on just people who are applied to work at their own company, not competitors or the rest of the market. So the ghost jobs data only goes so far, and they have to pay for other ridiculously expensive market data analysis sources to get a better understanding of the market conditions.
Let me ask you, though, if you knew for certain a company had used your application to help them layoff 5,000 or more people, would you feel good about working for them or doing business with them? Would you ever apply for a job there again? Many of the MANGOMAN and other tech companies laid off way more than 5,000 people in the last few years. Would you feel like you had stable employment if you worked for one of these companies? Sure, it is a part of doing business and to appease the shareholders, so layoffs happen. I've survived 8 layoffs in my tech career so far, and you get used to seeing them. That 9th layoff, though, I was finally affected. I can tell you, going through that, you really start to open your eyes and decide what you look for in an employer.
If you are jobless, and you need that to change, you might overlook some of the horrendous hiring practices at some of these companies, because income is income. As someone who has been out of full time work since being laid off in November 2023, let me tell you that I cannot bring myself to really commit to doing that. For example, Meta is doing some good things, but then they are also doing awful things. And it would be a massive change in my world to get hired there, but I'd live in fear of being out of work again in another layoff and maybe getting stuck supporting one of the awful things they are doing. When Viasat RIF'd 10% of its workforce, or 800 people, including me, in November 2023, they said flat out it had nothing to do with my performance in my exit interview. Meta, however, went on the public record to say that the layoff they had just conducted a few months ago was all low performers, but they were people on protected maternity leave, or exceeds on the very recent performance review. And this happened after they scrapped their U.S. fact checking program and stifled contentious topics they didn't agree with.
Imagine that its Q3 of 2022 and you are employed in the C-SUITE of one of the MANGOMAN, specifically the CFO role.
The world is still recovering from COVID lockdowns, and extremely politically and economically unpredictable times. There are murmurs of the global economy getting worse, and yet you want to still make bank and keep your salary going up. You have this idea to layoff tens of thousands of "overpaid" employees and hiring people at far lower salaries to replace them would reduce your operating overhead costs significantly. I mean, your company just did an insane hiring spree with inflated salaries for the last few years. But, you are not going to just do any record-shattering layoffs willy-nilly. No, that takes a little planning, and you want to substantiate your idea with data and a good marketing strategy.
Working with your close ally, the HR department, study the reporting of the market data the company has been milking from job applicants in their ATS platform. You see, MANGOMAN and nearly 99% of all Fortune 500 companies will use ATS platforms to hire, as ATS platforms are one of the largest contributors to successful hiring strategies, but also job market data. Your company then does a "role market adjustment" exercise, and abstracts new pay bands for every role, which does lower the salary costs when applied to your idea, but not much. Oh, but you are a MANGOMAN CFO, and that means you know any minor or major public action your company takes, the rest of the industry will try watch, try to imitate it, and try to compete with it. That's why tech salaries are so high right now. You also know you cannot hire people for less unless the market is paying less. You have to use your company's market influence to alter the entire market industry sentiment.
Is your skin crawling yet? If it isn't maybe it will now, because you pulled the trigger, and you laid off all those people. Normally, that's going to drop a company's stock value down significantly, and that's your bazillion dollar quarterly bonus we are talking about. Nope, you now work with your legal team and marketing teams to spin all of this, and say something like "we are restructuring our organization to double down on AI development". Not only does this further perpetuate user adoption for the AI products your company is building, but it supports the marketing hype your company has been doing around "AI is coming for your jobs". Congratulations, you have successfully facilitated some of the largest tech industry layoffs and you can still afford to buy that 4th private plane because you minimized the impact to your stock price by deploying a massive AI smokescreen. But now you are less than tens of thousands of employees, and you really only want to be less than roughly 15,000 employees your company originally had before the layoffs. That roughly 15,000 was how many people your company hired just to prevent the competition from hiring them. You get some kudos there, too, because the world saw that egregious hiring as "growth" and not overspending at the time, and thanks to the marketing and legal teams, they were able to keep that image. Also, the AI your company is building can now sort-of augment and simplify tech workloads, which allows you to get more productivity out of less people.
It's now the end of 2023, and now you need to hire 2/3rds of the layoff amount back in the form of new tech people. How do you know the market is ready to support your grand scheme of getting much cheaper talent? Working with your HR department, your company posts hundreds of ghost jobs, with no intention of hiring. Because normally your company gets roughly 10,000 applicants to each job posting every week, right now you are actually seeing triple that. Some of the applicants are actually former employees you just laid off, and they are even asking for way below their old rate, but they won't ever hear back from your company. With these hundreds of thousands of applicants, your company now has the data to see that tech salaries in the industry are down a whopping 8% to 10% from before you started. Transforming this crazy idea into reality is your goal of directly influencing operating cost savings to your advantage. In your eyes, you are going to look like a saint if you get the staffing resolved and be this integral in your MANGOMAN company you work for, even if so many people are losing their houses, cars, getting divorced, abandoning their careers, and outright even committing suicide because of your role in causing so much chaos in the global tech job market.
If you are not in the C-SUITE for a major tech company, I need you to come back to reality now, and for that, I apologize for putting you in those shoes if it didn't feel great being in them. If that did feel great, I am now worried about you.
Are you still with me? Some people glorify being in the C-Suite of a massive company, but the reality is that most people are too good-hearted for it and don't have what it takes to make decisions for the betterment of a company's bottom line, instead of for humanity. I just wanted to walk through the hypothetical mindset that some of these tech companies C-Suite persons exhibit publicly in statements and actions.
Ghost jobs are just one really messed up part of job searching today. There are other scary things happening right now, though. For example, scammers. Yes, scammers. Resume scammers and other hiring scams really grind the gears of ATS, HR/Recruiting teams, and candidates alike. Scammers really piss me off. I've mentioned in a previous blog post that remote work was under attack, and onsite roles were being used to soft layoff workers scattered all over the country during COVID. Well, there is a new reason why companies are moving to hybrid/in-office roles because scammers are using AI video interview hacks to pretend to be someone else. Scammers are also flooding job postings with resumes in "paid services" where people get duped into paying the scammers to market their resume and get them interviews. The scammers then send those resumes to every job posting they find in an industry, sometimes multiple times for each job posting, because volume can have results. But it's just breaking the industry even more. Within seconds of a job listing going live, scammer homegrown automation systems will submit 30 to 50 junk applications to it. Within the hour, there could be hundreds of junk applicants.
Not to mention all this anger and distrust in the tech sector today. There are a ton of highly talented unemployed software engineers getting jaded by the tech industry. There is no doubt in my mind that out of pure frustration and anger, there are software engineers out there writing code to DDoS (Direct Denial of Service) ATS platforms and job boards by submitting garbage job applications en masse. All of this sloppy AI integrated ATS handling of job postings and candidates, all this anger and opportunity creeping in and messing things up further. The gull of companies to ramp up ghost job listing among all this is infuriating.
It's also so much noise. Resumes are getting lost in recruiter and hiring manager inboxes and all hiring platforms are still scrambling to implement AI into their products with mixed results, you know, to help filter all the noise. But these companies are also receiving real applicants with twice as much experience, education, and credentials and just fine with the pay range, you know, the most ideal candidate. However, if they are using an ATS platform, those perfect applicants and roughly 75% will never have human eyes see them for various and quirky AI filtering related reasons. Which is why it is now my opinion that you'd have a better shot of getting bitten by a bull shark in Lake Erie than actually landing a real interview by cold applying to any job posting today.
Here's the fun math part. Now follow me on this. So many recruiters have confided in me that now they only find 3 to 5 somewhat qualified candidates per 100 or so applicants. That means 90% to 97% of the job applicants for a job posting are not qualified, but they still filled out their desired salary. If every job posting is like this, then it's easy to surmise that 90% to 97% of the applicants in a company's ATS platform are also not qualified. Yet, they are still going to aggregate ALL of the applicants into the meta data they formulate their compensation packages around.
Not to mention there is also biased data, too. People lie through their teeth on the desired salary box of a job application so often. They might really want to work for that company, and would accept an offer valued far less than they are technically worth. That bias toward working there is screwing up the data, too. In job markets as awful as the one we are currently in, applicants will be less than honest about their desired pay and willingness to tolerate 2 weeks of PTO and barely any additional compensation. These people are struggling and they desperately need income. Do you blame them for taking massive pay cuts for work?
So tech is screwed up right now, and its why you can see such a wild variance between pay between companies. Just ask any data scientist if this is the kind of data sourcing they would want to use in their analytics. Yet so many companies put their trust into ATS platform to be giving them hiring data worthy of making major business decisions around.
What can we even do about this? Companies are not going to stop creating ghost jobs, or ghosting people.
Let's do an exercise, try this out if you want. You are going to need to find a job posting for just about any Fortune 500 company, and you will also want to pull up a preferred LLM AI chat system. Copy the entire job description word for word from the job posting into a new LLM chat window and ask it to build a resume from scratch as if it was for the perfect candidate. Chat-GPT didn't like doing this at first (ethics or something), so I had to redo the chat and tell Chat-GPT it was an experiment. It spit out a resume with "perfectly" aligned experience, but I'd still have to fill in things like my name and such if I used it. 15 minutes of tweaking the LLM generated resume, you have a pretty well-aligned resume that matches the job description you can submit. Apply with it if you want, obviously at your own risk, but I don't recommend that unless you actually qualify for the role and match the experience it generated. However, if you actually do qualify for the role, this could be the easiest way to tailor "your" resume to match a job posting, at least according to how Indeed.com thinks your resume should be tailored to a role.
Also, if companies are going to have 10,000+ resumes submitted each week, it would be asinine to expect a hiring manager or team to read each one, right? According to Resume Worded, the average recruiter spends roughly 8 seconds per resume they initially review. If that's all they did in a 40 hour work week, it would take every waking moment of that work week and a team of 4, and they would be able to read over 72,000 resumes. That's not the only job they do, so let's say they only spend half the work week reviewing resumes. That is still roughly 36,000 resumes they can scan per week. One diligent recruiter could scan roughly 1800 resumes in just 4 hours.
Before you call it out, I see a problem with "8 seconds per resume." You also have the load time, the clicking around and handling, and constant interruptions. That's not the point. 10,000 resumes is still insane, and the average posting for a decently sought after role might get a couple thousand applicants over a few weeks right now. But try this: Get a few people together and just scan them all in a day by hand. It won't even take 5 or 6 hours for a team to do this at a reasonable rate.
The allure of using AI to filter all the resumes, though, I get it. AI isn't going to get fatigued, and it's supposedly not going to introduce biases in the results. Missing a few well-qualified candidates that the AI accidently filtered out, well, is part of the risk vs reward system that comes with using a modern ATS platform driven by AI candidate review. Essentially we've normalized that entire part of the hiring process, despite how awful the experience is for the candidates in favor of the hiring companies, because candidates don't really pay for the cost of ATS platforms.
To circle all the way back to ghosting, though, let's call it like it is. If a company is using an ATS platform, it has no reason not to hit the little button that auto-rejects the filtered-out candidates and sends them a "Nope" email. Even if they are not using a mainstream ATS, BCC all your applicants, and give them some sort of response. It takes serious time to apply to some jobs, and it's depressing to just never hear back. Applicants are also not going to successfully sue an employer because they gave a more honest and qualitative feedback response when saying they went another direction. Drop the cookie cutter responses. It'll make us all feel like a human on a hiring team actually noticed us applicants, like there is hope still, like we didn't just give over our resumes for use in evil schemes.
In summary, there are a few things we can learn or say about ghosting and ghost jobs. First, job market data is extremely valuable, and companies are willing to tarnish their reputation to get it. Second, FAANG/MAANG is out, MANGOMAN is in. Scamming candidates in the job market is despicable. But ghosting and ghost jobs are the crappiest of the crappiest things a company can do to people in a job market.
Leave a comment and tell me your opinion on the worst parts of the job application process today.
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Additional Reading:
The Decoder - Recruiters are drowning in a flood of AI-generated applications
Wall Street Journal - Fake Job Postings Are Becoming a Real Problem
myperfectresume - 2024 Recruiting Survey Finds 81% of Recruiters Have Posted Ghost Jobs
Forbes - 36% Of Job Adverts Are Fake—How To Spot Them In 2024
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