This statistic constantly confuses people who haven't done hiring.
If we decide we're going to grow headcount by 10 senior software engineers, we don't copy and paste the same job listing 10 times. We leave it open and collect resumes through that. At a large or fast growing company, we might never stop interviewing and hiring senior software engineers. The listing stays open for a year or more.
There are also specialty roles where hiring takes months. I've had niche roles open where we didn't get any applicants with any experience on the topic for over 90 days on multiple occasions.
So you should apply to old job postings? Consensus in LATAM seems to be, they just forgot to take them down and they already have someone or in Latin America if you repost the same opening over and over the consensus seems to be the company is toxic they have a turnover problem, maybe you should say outright you're looking for 10 people
Some common sense goes a long way. If the job listing is from a company with 10,000 people, you can assume that they're always hiring. Submit away.
If the listing is generic like "senior software engineer" and all of the requirements are generic like being able to program or do teamwork, it's probably a generic listing.
Applying anyway is a safe bet, but I wouldn't invest as much energy into tailoring your resume if it's a 6 month old posting from a 50 person company with a website that looks like it's from 2009. That company probably forgot to take the listing down.
> maybe you should say outright you're looking for 10 people
This wouldn't help because you have no way of knowing if they've already hired 9 people or 1 person.
The target can also change constantly. At a large enough company you continuously lose people for natural reasons, like retirement, moving for a spouse, moving to be closer to family. Past a tipping point you're just always hiring.
> At a large enough company you continuously lose people for natural reasons, like retirement, moving for a spouse, moving to be closer to family. Past a tipping point you're just always hiring.
As an analogy it's kinda like hard drives: when one of my hard drives dies, it's An Event which I need to deal with specifically; I need to order a replacement for that specific drive. At Google's server farms, hard drives dying is just a statistic, you continuously buy hard drives just because you know existing drives are gonna die at some semi-predictable rate.
No this is not common sense. No company in LATAM has 10000 people. Large companies just aren't a thing here. Most companies here are the 50 people companies you mention so the normal thing is to hire occasionally. And LATAM never had an industrial revolution so software positions are just rare unless the company is larger than the local average. If you do find one, it's not a pure one or is service oriented, not to build a product. What I mean is, building a technological product is rare let alone as a product company in LATAM and most technical positions are service or outsourcing oriented. If you find a technical product role like being a mobile developer, it's often not at a company that offers a technological product but a service in another industry like a bank
You don't think MercadoLibre has job postings open all the time just to replace the people who are leaving? They're around 120 000 people, is each of those people hand-picked for a particular position and not just hired because they know they need to replace some percentage of workers who'll leave?
Is it a big list? No. Is it a bank? Yep... but then Capital One is a large employer of tech in the US. Estimates put Walmart (certainly not a "tech" company) at having 20,000 technical roles.
Discriminating between technology product and technology role at a "regular" industry or service seems a bit biased. I (software developer) haven't worked at a tech company for the past two decades (and frankly, while wages are lower than the tech company jobs my job stability is much higher).
Often you pay to have that posting. For a smaller company they def know that posting is still up. Likely they are just getting poor applications (or need to improve their posting because the right people are not seeing it)
In the age of LLMs every one is "tailoring" their resume to every posting.
Company's own website job listings are likely actually in an applicant tracking system (ATS) like Greenhouse or Ashby because they need to manage the pipeline, not just list the job.
> Some common sense goes a long way. If the job listing is from a company with 10,000 people, you can assume that they're always hiring. Submit away.
Common sense would dictate that a company with 10,000 people has a need for a diverse set of roles, and it would be completely stupid to recycle the same template pretending the role was always the same. In fact, repeating a stale advert suggests the company does in fact not have positions opened and either forgot to pull an old advert or some recruiter is trawling for applications to pretend to be productive.
You can, but you’re probably wrong and are wasting your time and effort going through lord knows how many hoops to submit a simple CV.
Were submissions as simple as “here’s my CV, contact me if you like what you see”, then this wouldn’t be a problem. But when you have to sign up to the millionth HR service with the same 50 “please input the info that’s already on the resume you’re submitting” steps over and over again just to never hear back from the company or get rejected 6 months later, “submit away” is not an acceptable answer.
> This wouldn't help because you have no way of knowing if they've already hired 9 people or 1 person.
Yes, it would. Even if only 1 of the 10 spots is available, it still is a valid listing. Not knowing if the listing is valid at all is way worse.
Asking for “common sense” only works if the situation you are in makes sense to begin with. Job listings are a cesspit of bad behaviour, dark patterns, disrespectful processes and incongruous offers.
What we need is some sort of regulation on how job listings are posted and how candidates can and should apply.
While we’re at it, it should be utterly ILLEGAL and absolutely liable to have a job listing up with no salary range or a salary range that’s too wide to give a sense of what compensation looks like—lying about it should trigger serious legal consequences as well.
It’s about time candidates were treated with some dignity.
What kind of attitude? Wanting employers to respect my goddamned time? Wanting to know how much employers are willing to pay for my services?
Yeah. I want a job listing to actively tell me how much I stand to gain in exchange for my time and skills. How absolutely entitled of me. Imagine that? A potential employee wanting to know upfront how much their time is worth in the eyes of a potential employer? Nonsense! You get what you get and you don’t get upset.
If that’s your line of reasoning then I can only assume you’re exactly the type of employer that indulges in such practices.
This is not helpful and untrue, if you've tried to apply for jobs within the laat ~6+ years you will know it's screaming into the void. New accounts for the N+ glassdoor/indeed/bamboo/handshake/yougettheidea clones. Poorly pulling information from an uploaded resume, requiring manually editing or adding the info _every_ time. If your dilligent/dumb you writing a cover letter for each one (no AI the signal is too bad), then you submit it and wait an arbitrary amount of time for the rejection. There is a good reason people are complaining, it's asinine to put this on jpb seekers.
Two things can be true. I’ve applied to a few jobs in the last few years and got a few of them as well. Does not mean that the hoops I had to jump through were any less demeaning, disrespectful or downright stupid.
Yes. I recently got a job (IT infrastructure engineer with a non-tech company) on a posting that was 6 months old. they had filled it, and at the same time got approval for a second headcount so they never pulled it down
As someone with a niche job and title (and comes pretty decorated), I would expect to hear back on my applications more often and yet I get nothing either. There are some prominent companies (cough Figma, Smartsheet, Stripe cough) who literally have had an open role for exactly my job for nearly 3+ years without filling it.
Maybe I'm thinking a bit too much of myself, but it doesn't seem like they are that interested in really filling it.
I'm curious, for the niche or senior roles, have you personally read through the resumes or do you depend on the recruiter? I hear you on the entry and early-career jobs, but I see Director and VP roles also open for months. With all the layoffs, it's hard to belief there is not SOME talent in there worth hiring or at least training up.
Then you'd still only have a small number of roles up, not the thousands of positions the article is showing for some companies. They'd be hiring hundreds of thousands a year if they were constantly interviewing for all of them, and I don't believe O'Reilly Auto Parts is recruiting people as quickly as a nation at war.
No, the exact opposite! A high percentage of ghost jobs indicates that there are very few actual jobs open in the field, which suggests an oversupply of workers.
Not necessarily indicates any 1 thing; it can be fake job posts to signal growth, could be an extra picky hiring manager, even a decrepit company that forgot to close it.
I agree with that, just responding to the parent who wrote that their company keeps the hiring listed. So, in their case it's true but in other cases it is not.
I agree, I should have written a bit more, apologies.
I think people just latch onto ideas that try to simplify and make sense of frustrating situations where they dont have control. "Ghost jobs" are thing to blame now, for a while is was that taxcode thing for software engineers.
I see this for experienced roles too, especially where pay isn't super competitive. If you need a lead software engineer in a certain city for a certain salary, that often means waiting months for them to come across it. 10 junior engineers may apply but ultimately they just can't perform the role required
There are some browser plugins you can use for job sites like LinkedIn to filter out Ghost Jobs. It's been somewhat helpful, but honestly it feels like 90% of tech jobs right now are Ghost jobs.
It's happened so many times. Apply for a job, within an hour get an email that says I am not qualified (not true), and then a week later the same job gets posted again.
I'm normally a pretty free-market guy, but it should be illegal. It's clear-cut fraud - they are advertising something that doesn't exist, specifically to game numbers. And what's more, governments report on these numbers as if they are real job opportunities in the economy.
Hiring has been crazy for years. It's worse with remote jobs because you get a firehose of applicants everywhere.
When I was doing a lot of hiring I tried to be as responsive as possible because you don't want to lose the best candidates. I would try to review applicants as fast as they came in. You have to understand that in that hour I might get 40 resumes. 1 or 2 are amazing, another 2-3 could be worth a look, and another 5 might have made the cut if I didn't just read those 2-5 much better resumes ahead of them.
If you met the listing qualifications but got rejected as not qualified, I would double check that your resume wasn't unclear about something. You would not believe how many times I've interviewed candidates who had some key experience that they forgot to include on the resume and didn't realize it was missing until it spontaneously came up in talking to them.
The simpler explanation is that a tired hiring manager was just clicking buttons to dismiss applicants who didn't make the cut.
> If you met the listing qualifications but got rejected as not qualified, I would double check that your resume wasn't unclear about something. You would not believe how many times I've interviewed candidates who had some key experience that they forgot to include on the resume and didn't realize it was missing until it spontaneously came up in talking to them.
That assumes that I am writing my resume for just your job posting. If I am just going to copy and paste the job requirement verbatim on my resume, doesn't that make your job screening applicants for actual experience much harder? Often times the difference is splitting hairs anyway ("we're looking for someone who paints brown houses").
But as a rule I don't customize my resume for every job posting anyway - if I have to apply to 70+ job listings to even hear back from even one of them, I would just frankly not have the time to do so.
Regardless, if my application is getting thrown out because my title is not quite right in a subtle way, or I reference Javascript but not Python, and no one is telling me - that's unfair on everybody. The company is going to skip over the best candidates for superficial reasons, because nobody is telling them their resume isn't perfect.
The consistent reports I'm getting through friends who have spoken to recruiters is just that standards have increased dramatically. Firms accepting only a single candidate CV from a recruiter instead of 5 or more, and the recruiter downstream working their ass off to ensure it is absolutely the best possible CV, because if it's not then they don't get paid.
> Firms accepting only a single candidate CV from a recruiter instead of 5 or more
Why though? I've done hiring before - it takes less than 30 seconds to skim a resume. The recruiters also have no idea what the responsibility is for the jobs they are hiring for - it's a terrible place to bottleneck candidates on.
It sounds like everyone, including recruiters, are being sent on a snipe hunt.
I would guess that with bots and AI, a lot of resumes are not even from real candidates, and those that are, are AI slop. I don't envy recruiters or hiring managers these days.
There are also a lot of reposts coming from recruiting companies.
I see a position getting posted for a local company, and within hours the same requirements are showing up for 10 new postings with vague company names like "... is wanted for a local manufacturer" etc.
After I scheduled an appointment which I realized was a "recruiter" the zoom link showed the local time zone for the recruiter was from some West African country. I cancelled the appointment.
The way I got my current job is that the company I applied for rejected my application and then hired a recruiter who brought me in with the same application.
The company essentially handed the recruiter $10k because they were too bad at reviewing their own applications.
Investors for one. If these are larger companies, they will often inflate their actual hiring numbers to make it look like they are anticipating more growth than they are actually expecting.
But I certainly feel ripped off applying for jobs they never intended on filling. If they put up a lot of hoops to jump through to apply (submit a portfolio, set up an account, write a cover letter specific to our company), times that by the 1000 people who have applied, and it's an exorbitant amount of human time getting wasted.
The job market should be just that, a market, between buyers and sellers, not people who pretend to be buying in order to look like they've got money.
I know this analogy breaks down a little bit since this behavior does actually happen, sort of, in real life p2p markets but the point is, it sucks and if you've ever sold anything on fb marketplace you know how obnoxious it is dealing with people who demand a lot of you but do not intend to actually commit to buying what you're selling.
Every time I've hired someone at a big company, it's taken multiple months to get candidates through the pipeline, and it was not uncommon to have to go back to the candidate pool when someone would accept an offer and change their mind before starting. 90 days to fill a role would be considered pretty quick.
What an absolutely insane way to do business. Everybody is out here trying to squeeze every last drop of efficiency out of software teams to the point of shipping garbage. Meanwhile managers, executives, and hr are operating under the belief that taking literal months to move "candidates through the pipeline" is eminently reasonable.
Remember that the average job candidate is absolutely clueless about how positions are created and filled in real life, so seeing bad assumptions like “most positions are filled in under ninety days” shouldn’t be surprising.
IME (hiring, not interviewing) it's always been 3-4 rounds. First is an HR phone screen (usually 20-30 minutes on the phone), 2nd with hiring manager, 3rd with a senior engineer/architect, and a 4th with the hiring VP. And those are almost always combined into a single morning or afternoon(2+3 or 3+4) and the final round doesn't always happen (VP's choice).
I was under the impression a large % of jobs posted on jobs sites are done simply for compliance reasons and because HR has some "bullshit jobs" parts to it and the companies will usually simply hire from within the company itself.
It would be genuinely shocking to me if someone came up with evidence that the majority of jobs on job sites were made by companies that actually intended to hire the best candidate that applied through that site!
Probably a lot of those that have remained open will also stay that way, because they are (1) fake job ads, or (2) job ads of companies, where you don't even reach a human soul during the application process, and the companies don't realize how broken their hiring process really is, or (3) job ads of companies, who have so unrealistic idea about what they are looking for and what they themselves are actually offering to attract whomever they are looking for, that almost no one applying meets the criteria.
Probably I also forgot some more categories of crazy hiring processes in my enumeration.
At least in my country, a job posting that stays up forever isn't a ghost job. It's a company that can't keep people. Either the conditions are brutal or the pay is garbage.
I've about given up looking for a remote job even as a software engineer with over 20+ years of experience especially with macOS since I never seem to get a reply or "no longer accepting applicants".
I've been hearing people looking for jobs with (to me) weird theories about fake/ghost job postings, that the employer never plans to fill... they have various theories of why (hypothetical) employers would do this that I don't quite follow.
Has anyone else heard of/seen this, or can explain where it's coming from or if it means anything?
It is clear signal but its causes are multiple and I am not sure what percent attribution each one has:
1) Roles with high turnover. Likely the posting stays always on.
2) The pay is bad and nobody takes the job.
3) The role is too niche and the candidates in the market with visibility to the role are very few.
4) Aggressive hiring. Candidates have many options and until they actually show up at work, you keep interviewing other candidates.
5) Forgotten posts / ghost posts (my gut feeling says that this is the lowest contributor to the spike we observe, as likely it should be flat over time)
I conduct interviews pretty often for various levels. Interviews seems so broken from both sides. Hard to find jobs that aren’t ghost jobs. Hard to find candidates that won’t cheat using AI and actually know their stuff. Just feels like AI has made hiring in tech even more inefficient which says a lot.
As someone that's currently looking (with plenty of experience, corporate, startup, and contract), can confirm it's pretty rough out there. I think the application process is just becoming enshittified: because HR uses AI to filter, applicants are starting to use AI to apply, so we have volumes and volumes of nonsense flowing back and forth.
Been working professionally for ~15 years or so, and it's never been this bad. Other than "knowing someone" (i.e. a referral, and even that falls through routinely), not sure what the best way to snag a position is these days.
“US business continues to boom,” S&P Global Market Intelligence chief business
economist Chris Williamson said in a statement. “To put the growth surge in
context, barring the spike in demand following the opening up of the economy
after the COVID-19 lockdowns, the latest improvement in business activity
is the greatest recorded since early 2015. Business is clearly booming now in
both manufacturing and services.”
Is it booming for everyone except software developers? I keep hearing about developers who have been looking for a job for 6 months or longer and don't get responses to applications.
Or is it some process failure (which you hint at) that is making it difficult to capitalize on that boom?
Ghost jobs! Tremendous dataset. Hospitality and education roles listed near the top are likely strong signal the wages are inadequate and a refusal to raise the wage to a market clearing price. Healthcare is self explanatory, demand is voracious due to a rapidly aging population and wages available and appropriate in many cases.
> Hospitality postings sit the longest: 43.9% have been open more than 90 days, median 65 days. Healthcare turns over fastest at 19.7%.
(kudos to unlisted for aggregating and reporting, this gives me a data point to offer to jurisdictions and regulators interested in compliance monitoring in this context)
Education roles are also an indication of mandatory listing: they have someone internally in mind for a future vacancy but are legally required to list it.
It's the case for most government jobs (which in the US most education roles are for government institutions--whether it be traditional K-12 schools or universities). The law in most states and at the federal level require opening jobs to the general public to prevent favoritism, encourage diversity, discourage corruption, etc. It usually just results in having a job posting that is filled before it's posted as they will have an internal candidate, and the rest is for show
Source of truth from this one is I've worked in public higher ed in two states in the US and gone through this process personally
My partner is a teacher in rural Canada and this is true here, at least. District admins often design a role with someone in mind, setting very specific requirements to that effect (needs to have shop AND socials training/experience is one that comes to mind). They need to post the job to meet union criteria, but only one person could realistically fit the bill.
This statistic constantly confuses people who haven't done hiring.
If we decide we're going to grow headcount by 10 senior software engineers, we don't copy and paste the same job listing 10 times. We leave it open and collect resumes through that. At a large or fast growing company, we might never stop interviewing and hiring senior software engineers. The listing stays open for a year or more.
There are also specialty roles where hiring takes months. I've had niche roles open where we didn't get any applicants with any experience on the topic for over 90 days on multiple occasions.
So you should apply to old job postings? Consensus in LATAM seems to be, they just forgot to take them down and they already have someone or in Latin America if you repost the same opening over and over the consensus seems to be the company is toxic they have a turnover problem, maybe you should say outright you're looking for 10 people
Some common sense goes a long way. If the job listing is from a company with 10,000 people, you can assume that they're always hiring. Submit away.
If the listing is generic like "senior software engineer" and all of the requirements are generic like being able to program or do teamwork, it's probably a generic listing.
Applying anyway is a safe bet, but I wouldn't invest as much energy into tailoring your resume if it's a 6 month old posting from a 50 person company with a website that looks like it's from 2009. That company probably forgot to take the listing down.
> maybe you should say outright you're looking for 10 people
This wouldn't help because you have no way of knowing if they've already hired 9 people or 1 person.
The target can also change constantly. At a large enough company you continuously lose people for natural reasons, like retirement, moving for a spouse, moving to be closer to family. Past a tipping point you're just always hiring.
> At a large enough company you continuously lose people for natural reasons, like retirement, moving for a spouse, moving to be closer to family. Past a tipping point you're just always hiring.
As an analogy it's kinda like hard drives: when one of my hard drives dies, it's An Event which I need to deal with specifically; I need to order a replacement for that specific drive. At Google's server farms, hard drives dying is just a statistic, you continuously buy hard drives just because you know existing drives are gonna die at some semi-predictable rate.
No this is not common sense. No company in LATAM has 10000 people. Large companies just aren't a thing here. Most companies here are the 50 people companies you mention so the normal thing is to hire occasionally. And LATAM never had an industrial revolution so software positions are just rare unless the company is larger than the local average. If you do find one, it's not a pure one or is service oriented, not to build a product. What I mean is, building a technological product is rare let alone as a product company in LATAM and most technical positions are service or outsourcing oriented. If you find a technical product role like being a mobile developer, it's often not at a company that offers a technological product but a service in another industry like a bank
You don't think MercadoLibre has job postings open all the time just to replace the people who are leaving? They're around 120 000 people, is each of those people hand-picked for a particular position and not just hired because they know they need to replace some percentage of workers who'll leave?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Brazilian_comp...
While the 9th largest is 7,777 people reported... all the others are at least 40,000 people and the largest two are over 100,000.
Itaú Unibanco https://www.itau.com.br/download-file/v2/d/42787847-4cf6-446... shows 80,657 employees in Brazil in Q2 of 2026.
And for tech jobs... https://carreiras.itau.com.br/busca-de-vagas/software/35299/...
Is it a big list? No. Is it a bank? Yep... but then Capital One is a large employer of tech in the US. Estimates put Walmart (certainly not a "tech" company) at having 20,000 technical roles.
Discriminating between technology product and technology role at a "regular" industry or service seems a bit biased. I (software developer) haven't worked at a tech company for the past two decades (and frankly, while wages are lower than the tech company jobs my job stability is much higher).
I googled and literally the first result was LATAM Airlines who have 44,000 employees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LATAM_Airlines
Airlines and state owned companies seem to be the exception
ok, that statement seems a bit different than your previous one of "No company in LATAM has 10000 people."
Petrobras?
Often you pay to have that posting. For a smaller company they def know that posting is still up. Likely they are just getting poor applications (or need to improve their posting because the right people are not seeing it)
In the age of LLMs every one is "tailoring" their resume to every posting.
This depends a ton on if we're talking about a company's own website's job listings or if it's on some dedicated job listing site.
Company's own website job listings are likely actually in an applicant tracking system (ATS) like Greenhouse or Ashby because they need to manage the pipeline, not just list the job.
> Some common sense goes a long way. If the job listing is from a company with 10,000 people, you can assume that they're always hiring. Submit away.
Common sense would dictate that a company with 10,000 people has a need for a diverse set of roles, and it would be completely stupid to recycle the same template pretending the role was always the same. In fact, repeating a stale advert suggests the company does in fact not have positions opened and either forgot to pull an old advert or some recruiter is trawling for applications to pretend to be productive.
> you can assume that they're always hiring.
You can, but you’re probably wrong and are wasting your time and effort going through lord knows how many hoops to submit a simple CV.
Were submissions as simple as “here’s my CV, contact me if you like what you see”, then this wouldn’t be a problem. But when you have to sign up to the millionth HR service with the same 50 “please input the info that’s already on the resume you’re submitting” steps over and over again just to never hear back from the company or get rejected 6 months later, “submit away” is not an acceptable answer.
> This wouldn't help because you have no way of knowing if they've already hired 9 people or 1 person.
Yes, it would. Even if only 1 of the 10 spots is available, it still is a valid listing. Not knowing if the listing is valid at all is way worse.
Asking for “common sense” only works if the situation you are in makes sense to begin with. Job listings are a cesspit of bad behaviour, dark patterns, disrespectful processes and incongruous offers.
What we need is some sort of regulation on how job listings are posted and how candidates can and should apply.
While we’re at it, it should be utterly ILLEGAL and absolutely liable to have a job listing up with no salary range or a salary range that’s too wide to give a sense of what compensation looks like—lying about it should trigger serious legal consequences as well.
It’s about time candidates were treated with some dignity.
This kind of attitude is why some people cant find jobs. Meanwhile the ones who just emailed their cv and didnt overthink it are happily working.
What kind of attitude? Wanting employers to respect my goddamned time? Wanting to know how much employers are willing to pay for my services?
Yeah. I want a job listing to actively tell me how much I stand to gain in exchange for my time and skills. How absolutely entitled of me. Imagine that? A potential employee wanting to know upfront how much their time is worth in the eyes of a potential employer? Nonsense! You get what you get and you don’t get upset.
If that’s your line of reasoning then I can only assume you’re exactly the type of employer that indulges in such practices.
The UK is currently passing laws to make every job listing include salary:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg7gg2zdexo
That’s a good start.
Good luck on your job hunt.
Very kind of you good stranger. I’m not job hunting at the moment but I appreciate the support!
This is not helpful and untrue, if you've tried to apply for jobs within the laat ~6+ years you will know it's screaming into the void. New accounts for the N+ glassdoor/indeed/bamboo/handshake/yougettheidea clones. Poorly pulling information from an uploaded resume, requiring manually editing or adding the info _every_ time. If your dilligent/dumb you writing a cover letter for each one (no AI the signal is too bad), then you submit it and wait an arbitrary amount of time for the rejection. There is a good reason people are complaining, it's asinine to put this on jpb seekers.
> if you've tried to apply for jobs within the laat ~6+ years you will know it's screaming into the void
I have applied for, and got, 3 jobs in the last 8 years. So yeah I think I am allowed an opinion on it without people telling me Im wrong.
Two things can be true. I’ve applied to a few jobs in the last few years and got a few of them as well. Does not mean that the hoops I had to jump through were any less demeaning, disrespectful or downright stupid.
> So you should apply to old job postings?
Yes. I recently got a job (IT infrastructure engineer with a non-tech company) on a posting that was 6 months old. they had filled it, and at the same time got approval for a second headcount so they never pulled it down
You pay for job listings so it would be silly to not take them down.
You should, but you should always apply as early as possible.
The main reason the jobs are reposted are to get them to the top of the feed
As someone with a niche job and title (and comes pretty decorated), I would expect to hear back on my applications more often and yet I get nothing either. There are some prominent companies (cough Figma, Smartsheet, Stripe cough) who literally have had an open role for exactly my job for nearly 3+ years without filling it.
Maybe I'm thinking a bit too much of myself, but it doesn't seem like they are that interested in really filling it.
I'm curious, for the niche or senior roles, have you personally read through the resumes or do you depend on the recruiter? I hear you on the entry and early-career jobs, but I see Director and VP roles also open for months. With all the layoffs, it's hard to belief there is not SOME talent in there worth hiring or at least training up.
Then you'd still only have a small number of roles up, not the thousands of positions the article is showing for some companies. They'd be hiring hundreds of thousands a year if they were constantly interviewing for all of them, and I don't believe O'Reilly Auto Parts is recruiting people as quickly as a nation at war.
That's fair but still indicates shortage, no?
No, the exact opposite! A high percentage of ghost jobs indicates that there are very few actual jobs open in the field, which suggests an oversupply of workers.
Not necessarily indicates any 1 thing; it can be fake job posts to signal growth, could be an extra picky hiring manager, even a decrepit company that forgot to close it.
I agree with that, just responding to the parent who wrote that their company keeps the hiring listed. So, in their case it's true but in other cases it is not.
I agree, I should have written a bit more, apologies.
It’s a pipeline requisition or feeder requisition. Sometimes companies will close and refresh it. Can’t rely on job listings alone
I think people just latch onto ideas that try to simplify and make sense of frustrating situations where they dont have control. "Ghost jobs" are thing to blame now, for a while is was that taxcode thing for software engineers.
I see this for experienced roles too, especially where pay isn't super competitive. If you need a lead software engineer in a certain city for a certain salary, that often means waiting months for them to come across it. 10 junior engineers may apply but ultimately they just can't perform the role required
There are some browser plugins you can use for job sites like LinkedIn to filter out Ghost Jobs. It's been somewhat helpful, but honestly it feels like 90% of tech jobs right now are Ghost jobs.
It's happened so many times. Apply for a job, within an hour get an email that says I am not qualified (not true), and then a week later the same job gets posted again.
I'm normally a pretty free-market guy, but it should be illegal. It's clear-cut fraud - they are advertising something that doesn't exist, specifically to game numbers. And what's more, governments report on these numbers as if they are real job opportunities in the economy.
> Apply for a job, within an hour get an email
Hiring has been crazy for years. It's worse with remote jobs because you get a firehose of applicants everywhere.
When I was doing a lot of hiring I tried to be as responsive as possible because you don't want to lose the best candidates. I would try to review applicants as fast as they came in. You have to understand that in that hour I might get 40 resumes. 1 or 2 are amazing, another 2-3 could be worth a look, and another 5 might have made the cut if I didn't just read those 2-5 much better resumes ahead of them.
If you met the listing qualifications but got rejected as not qualified, I would double check that your resume wasn't unclear about something. You would not believe how many times I've interviewed candidates who had some key experience that they forgot to include on the resume and didn't realize it was missing until it spontaneously came up in talking to them.
The simpler explanation is that a tired hiring manager was just clicking buttons to dismiss applicants who didn't make the cut.
> If you met the listing qualifications but got rejected as not qualified, I would double check that your resume wasn't unclear about something. You would not believe how many times I've interviewed candidates who had some key experience that they forgot to include on the resume and didn't realize it was missing until it spontaneously came up in talking to them.
That assumes that I am writing my resume for just your job posting. If I am just going to copy and paste the job requirement verbatim on my resume, doesn't that make your job screening applicants for actual experience much harder? Often times the difference is splitting hairs anyway ("we're looking for someone who paints brown houses").
But as a rule I don't customize my resume for every job posting anyway - if I have to apply to 70+ job listings to even hear back from even one of them, I would just frankly not have the time to do so.
Regardless, if my application is getting thrown out because my title is not quite right in a subtle way, or I reference Javascript but not Python, and no one is telling me - that's unfair on everybody. The company is going to skip over the best candidates for superficial reasons, because nobody is telling them their resume isn't perfect.
The consistent reports I'm getting through friends who have spoken to recruiters is just that standards have increased dramatically. Firms accepting only a single candidate CV from a recruiter instead of 5 or more, and the recruiter downstream working their ass off to ensure it is absolutely the best possible CV, because if it's not then they don't get paid.
> Firms accepting only a single candidate CV from a recruiter instead of 5 or more
Why though? I've done hiring before - it takes less than 30 seconds to skim a resume. The recruiters also have no idea what the responsibility is for the jobs they are hiring for - it's a terrible place to bottleneck candidates on.
It sounds like everyone, including recruiters, are being sent on a snipe hunt.
I would guess that with bots and AI, a lot of resumes are not even from real candidates, and those that are, are AI slop. I don't envy recruiters or hiring managers these days.
There are also a lot of reposts coming from recruiting companies.
I see a position getting posted for a local company, and within hours the same requirements are showing up for 10 new postings with vague company names like "... is wanted for a local manufacturer" etc.
After I scheduled an appointment which I realized was a "recruiter" the zoom link showed the local time zone for the recruiter was from some West African country. I cancelled the appointment.
The way I got my current job is that the company I applied for rejected my application and then hired a recruiter who brought me in with the same application.
The company essentially handed the recruiter $10k because they were too bad at reviewing their own applications.
Sounds super annoying sorry it sucks but who exactly are they defrauding in your view? And what numbers are they gaming?
Investors for one. If these are larger companies, they will often inflate their actual hiring numbers to make it look like they are anticipating more growth than they are actually expecting.
But I certainly feel ripped off applying for jobs they never intended on filling. If they put up a lot of hoops to jump through to apply (submit a portfolio, set up an account, write a cover letter specific to our company), times that by the 1000 people who have applied, and it's an exorbitant amount of human time getting wasted.
The job market should be just that, a market, between buyers and sellers, not people who pretend to be buying in order to look like they've got money.
I know this analogy breaks down a little bit since this behavior does actually happen, sort of, in real life p2p markets but the point is, it sucks and if you've ever sold anything on fb marketplace you know how obnoxious it is dealing with people who demand a lot of you but do not intend to actually commit to buying what you're selling.
Investors maybe. Makes your company look better than it is.
Every time I've hired someone at a big company, it's taken multiple months to get candidates through the pipeline, and it was not uncommon to have to go back to the candidate pool when someone would accept an offer and change their mind before starting. 90 days to fill a role would be considered pretty quick.
What an absolutely insane way to do business. Everybody is out here trying to squeeze every last drop of efficiency out of software teams to the point of shipping garbage. Meanwhile managers, executives, and hr are operating under the belief that taking literal months to move "candidates through the pipeline" is eminently reasonable.
Remember that the average job candidate is absolutely clueless about how positions are created and filled in real life, so seeing bad assumptions like “most positions are filled in under ninety days” shouldn’t be surprising.
I am hearing from multiple people in hiring departments at different companies that they are doing 7-9 rounds of interviews for non-coding tech roles.
These companies have lost their minds.
That sounds pretty insane to me.
IME (hiring, not interviewing) it's always been 3-4 rounds. First is an HR phone screen (usually 20-30 minutes on the phone), 2nd with hiring manager, 3rd with a senior engineer/architect, and a 4th with the hiring VP. And those are almost always combined into a single morning or afternoon(2+3 or 3+4) and the final round doesn't always happen (VP's choice).
I was under the impression a large % of jobs posted on jobs sites are done simply for compliance reasons and because HR has some "bullshit jobs" parts to it and the companies will usually simply hire from within the company itself.
Sometimes that can happen but it is not common, certainly not a large % of job posts.
Do you have a source on that?
It would be genuinely shocking to me if someone came up with evidence that the majority of jobs on job sites were made by companies that actually intended to hire the best candidate that applied through that site!
Probably a lot of those that have remained open will also stay that way, because they are (1) fake job ads, or (2) job ads of companies, where you don't even reach a human soul during the application process, and the companies don't realize how broken their hiring process really is, or (3) job ads of companies, who have so unrealistic idea about what they are looking for and what they themselves are actually offering to attract whomever they are looking for, that almost no one applying meets the criteria.
Probably I also forgot some more categories of crazy hiring processes in my enumeration.
At least in my country, a job posting that stays up forever isn't a ghost job. It's a company that can't keep people. Either the conditions are brutal or the pay is garbage.
What country is it?
China
I've about given up looking for a remote job even as a software engineer with over 20+ years of experience especially with macOS since I never seem to get a reply or "no longer accepting applicants".
I've been hearing people looking for jobs with (to me) weird theories about fake/ghost job postings, that the employer never plans to fill... they have various theories of why (hypothetical) employers would do this that I don't quite follow.
Has anyone else heard of/seen this, or can explain where it's coming from or if it means anything?
It is clear signal but its causes are multiple and I am not sure what percent attribution each one has:
1) Roles with high turnover. Likely the posting stays always on. 2) The pay is bad and nobody takes the job. 3) The role is too niche and the candidates in the market with visibility to the role are very few. 4) Aggressive hiring. Candidates have many options and until they actually show up at work, you keep interviewing other candidates. 5) Forgotten posts / ghost posts (my gut feeling says that this is the lowest contributor to the spike we observe, as likely it should be flat over time)
Reposts from recruiting agencies or other unrelated companies to resell the candidates or simply farm user details for fraud etc.
So, you’re saying it’s not really a clear signal?
I conduct interviews pretty often for various levels. Interviews seems so broken from both sides. Hard to find jobs that aren’t ghost jobs. Hard to find candidates that won’t cheat using AI and actually know their stuff. Just feels like AI has made hiring in tech even more inefficient which says a lot.
Meaningless stat. My company keeps our website job listings open indefinitely and it's because we're always hiring. We're just extremely selective.
As someone that's currently looking (with plenty of experience, corporate, startup, and contract), can confirm it's pretty rough out there. I think the application process is just becoming enshittified: because HR uses AI to filter, applicants are starting to use AI to apply, so we have volumes and volumes of nonsense flowing back and forth.
Been working professionally for ~15 years or so, and it's never been this bad. Other than "knowing someone" (i.e. a referral, and even that falls through routinely), not sure what the best way to snag a position is these days.
I just read this on CNBC:
From https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/23/treasury-yields-oil-inflatio...Is it booming for everyone except software developers? I keep hearing about developers who have been looking for a job for 6 months or longer and don't get responses to applications.
Or is it some process failure (which you hint at) that is making it difficult to capitalize on that boom?
Ghost jobs! Tremendous dataset. Hospitality and education roles listed near the top are likely strong signal the wages are inadequate and a refusal to raise the wage to a market clearing price. Healthcare is self explanatory, demand is voracious due to a rapidly aging population and wages available and appropriate in many cases.
> Hospitality postings sit the longest: 43.9% have been open more than 90 days, median 65 days. Healthcare turns over fastest at 19.7%.
(kudos to unlisted for aggregating and reporting, this gives me a data point to offer to jurisdictions and regulators interested in compliance monitoring in this context)
Education roles are also an indication of mandatory listing: they have someone internally in mind for a future vacancy but are legally required to list it.
Any citations are welcome on this for my source of truth knowledge graph. Thank you in advance.
It's the case for most government jobs (which in the US most education roles are for government institutions--whether it be traditional K-12 schools or universities). The law in most states and at the federal level require opening jobs to the general public to prevent favoritism, encourage diversity, discourage corruption, etc. It usually just results in having a job posting that is filled before it's posted as they will have an internal candidate, and the rest is for show
Source of truth from this one is I've worked in public higher ed in two states in the US and gone through this process personally
My partner is a teacher in rural Canada and this is true here, at least. District admins often design a role with someone in mind, setting very specific requirements to that effect (needs to have shop AND socials training/experience is one that comes to mind). They need to post the job to meet union criteria, but only one person could realistically fit the bill.
Yeah because they ask for low level kernel 10yoe specialists AI llm inference training phd people lol
How do we know if this is normal or not? You really need a historical time series to know if it has always been like this or not
Historically the ad was in a newspaper and you would sit and circle them with your breakfast while listening to the wireless.
Companies didnt pay to put the ad in the paper every day once the vacancy was filled.
Hey, historically your "employer" would flog you if you tried to change "jobs".
Why is OP being downvoted to [dead] in every single comment here?