Ghost Jobs

Real companies, fake positions.

One in five job postings are fake?

Or are just one in five real and the rest junk?

Here are the motivations:

• Look open to external talent.

• Make it appear the company is growing.

• Signal employee workload will be alleviated.

• Make employees feel replaceable.

• Collect resumes for later use.

As I mentioned in Conspicuous Absence, I suspect the LinkedIn bots are both a network snoop thing, as well as an AI training method. Larger companies have HR support software, all those companies are trumpeting AI functionality, makes me wonder what percentage of ghost jobs are also AI training intake.

There’s a guy I know who is job hunting, he’s got some automated thing that applies all over the place. I want to go check this out a bit, see if it’s possible to gin up a bunch of bogus personas, and crapflood the ghost jobs system.

AI is doing to the whole world what computer evaluation did to popular music. You know that homogenized crapola you hear on the radio, where you can’t really tell where one ends and the next begins? That’s what I’m talkin’ ‘bout ..

As a perennially underemployed person facing a dramatically changed world the last six months, I find this absolutely infuriating. The things on that one job board that kinda fit me would require a human reviewer to look, say “Not precisely, but what a weird, interesting skill set this guy has, better forward him to the hiring manager”.

Conclusion:

So it’s back to old school networking, and if I land something good, then I’m gonna start a social movement to turn this ghost job scraping shite into a big fat negative.