Thread by @alexthechick

Thread on how decisions are only as good as the information on which they are based and the pernicious effects of bad, if not outright falsified, information. This is going to spring off a discussion of ghost jobs. Get your caffeine conveyance beverage of choice and let's get it.

There is an ever growing problem with the posting of ghost jobs. What is a ghost job? A ghost job is a job posting for a job that does not actually exist. The company that posts that job is not hiring for that position. The company is using the job listing for other reasons.

Back in the pre internet days, there was a nasty trick that law firms would pull. A law firm would post an ad for a job (secretary, paralegal, receptionist) and the address would be a PO Box. That was called a blind listing as the name of the firm wasn't given.

The firm wasn't hiring. What the firm was doing was seeing if any of the firm's current employees sent in a resume for this supposed job. If so, that employee would be fired for disloyalty.

With technology, it is now simplicity itself to post a fake job listing. Just put it up on any one, or all, of the major job sites. List it on the employment section of the company's own website. The costs are very low, especially now with AI generated job postings.

Here's an article from August, 2024 discussing the rise of ghost job listings.



That article contains some very interesting information. See screenshots below. cnbc.com/2024/08/22/gho…

Now, I dither on whether these listings should be called scams or fraud. What they are is an outright lie to the public that the job listing is real. It is being posted by the company with full knowledge by the company, but not the public, that the position doesn't exist.

The more interesting is the second screenshot about how in five years it went from 80% of job listings being real to 40%. In other words, it went from nearly certain that the job listing was for a job that existed to fairly likely that the job was fake. That is astounding.

If that information is accurate, that means that people applying for jobs have a less that 50% chance of applying for a job that exists. And there's no easy way for the public to know which of those jobs are real and which are not.

This destroys the ability of the job seeker to know if the problem is with the job seeker or not. This isn't even about brushing up on interviewing skills. People aren't getting to the interview stage. How is someone to know if the problem is resume and cover letter?

Presume rant here on having to SEO your resume to get past the computer scan for key words before even getting to a human. How is a person to know if the resume even got to that step? If 60% of job listings are fake, how on earth is a job seeker to know how to tailor a search?

It is, however, more pernicious than that. Why are ghost job postings on the rise? There are multiple reasons given by the companies doing this. One of the main ones that is given is that so the company looks like it is growing. As I keep saying, that's just fraud.

Another reason somewhat mirrors the blind posting reason: to scare current employees that their job is being replaced so you better shut your mouth and work all those hours and not ask for a raise.

And then there's the macro issue: all those ghost job postings make the job market look far more robust than it is. Presume rant here about the initial headlines about job growth and then a year later oh wait no, it was actually a downward revision of 818,000 jobs. Our bad.

The discussion of public policy matters is annihilated when the information about the underlying matter is utterly unreliable. Take the H1B fight. We, company, cannot find a US employee! Well. Is that job you posted a real one or not?

When it is impossible to know if the information is accurate, it is impossible to make an accurate decision that is based on that information. That, in turn, makes it not a decision, it makes it a pure guess. Or pure implementation of preferred policy alone.

The dangers of this should be obvious. Just get a job, there's so many out there, and employers cannot fill all those jobs they have listed! Really? Is that really true? Or is it all a lie? Here. Have a red panda. /fin