The corpocracy just keeps coming up with new ways to be evil:
If you’ve recently been laid off and have started the arduous process of looking for a new job, you’ve probably seen them on networking platforms like LinkedIn: postings for roles that are 30 days old, maybe more, with suspiciously wide salary ranges. They usually have hundreds, or even thousands, of hopeful applicants vying for the same position, but if you do a quick cross-check and notice that the role isn’t posted on the company’s actual website — or any of their social media pages — you should probably stop drafting that cover letter, because it’s possible they’re not hiring at all.
“Ghost jobs,” or ads for positions that aren’t actually open, are a common phenomenon in the tech industry, which has been plagued by layoffs and budget cuts over recent years. As unemployed workers struggle to regain their footing, recruiters and career coaches who spoke with SFGATE warned that these fake jobs posted by real companies serve multiple, sometimes insidious purposes.
According to a 2024 survey from MyPerfectResume, 81% of recruiters admitted to posting ads for positions that were fake or already filled. While some respondents said employers did it to maintain a presence on job boards and build a talent pool, it’s also used to commit psychological warfare: 25% said ghost jobs helped companies gauge how replaceable their employees were, while 23% said it helped make the company appear more stable during a hiring freeze. Another damning 2024 report from Resume Builder said that 62% companies posted them specifically to make their employees feel replaceable. They also made ads to “trick overworked employees” into believing that more people would be brought on to alleviate their overwhelming workload.
It also allows politicians to falsely claim that Americans are lazy, that more H1-Bs and immigrants are needed, and that immigration is good for the economy. If you’re a corporate executive, the best thing you can do is eliminate your Human Resources department, and discovering that they are posting ghost jobs would be an excellent justification for doing so.
Because the most important reason for creating ghost jobs is that they permit HR to engage in makework to cover the fact that they don’t even have anything to do when the business isn’t hiring.