Insubstantial

So the latest tend story to be bandied about in my LinkedIn feed is that of "Ghost Jobs." CBS News had a piece on them last week, citing a June survey from Résumé Builder. But the topic goes back farther; the BBC posted a story a couple of months ago, and financial services company Clarify Capital conducted a survey in August and September of 2022, and updated their story last October.

The findings of the surveys, such that 43% of employers used "ghost job" listings in 2022 to "keep current employees motivated, and this year that 62% of employers wanted to "make employees feel replaceable" are, predictably, prompting reactions.

But, as a contact of mine on LinkedIn pointed out some years back: Whenever you see something that outrages you, stop and think.

The Clarify Capital survey had 1,045 respondents, who are simply described as "managers" who were surveyed about Ghost Jobs. Résumé Builder outsourced their survey to the market research firm Pollfish, who put together a cohort of 649 hiring managers who completed the survey. "To qualify for the survey, all participants had to be over 25, have a household income of at least $75,000, have an education level above high school, have a manager-level role or higher, and work at a company with more than 10 employees. Respondents also had to indicate that they are involved in hiring at their company via a screening question."

And that's it. That's all we know. No data on company size or location, industry. No information on weighting or margin of error. According to the North American Industry Classification System Association, there are upwards of 1.5 million businesses operating in the United States with 10 or more people. To conclude, as Clarify does, that "1 in 5 managers [didn't] plan to fill open job positions until 2023," or, as Résumé Builder does, that: "4 in 10 Companies Posted a Fake Job Listing This Year" is to presume that the self-selected cohorts of respondents for the surveys are representative of the overall business community. But there's no good reason to presume that.

So I'm going to borrow a line from FiveThirtyEight, and label this a "Bad Use of Polling." The surveys don't really say anything useful because there's no way of relating the findings back to the actual business environment. In fact, they don't really even define "Ghost Jobs." Clarity Capital implies a definition, but doesn't actually give one, and Résumé Builder mostly uses "fake job listings," and CBS does the same, saying "or 'Ghost Jobs'," but nothing more.

This is becoming a story because it plays on the anxieties of worried job seekers, concerned that they're spending precious time chasing roles that don't actually exist. And packaging up anxiety to present peoples fears to them is how websites generate views and advertising impressions. And because there's no actual useful data behind any of this, it's just amorphous enough to provoke worry. But I think that it also affirms people's general suspicions that corporations are up to no good, and toying with people for their own cynical ends.

So are there enough false and misleading job postings out there that someone needs to take action? Maybe. But no-one knows; the surveys don't tell us.