I’ve spent more time than I would like looking for “a job”. Unfortunately most of that time has been looking at jobsite and company job pages. After a while my searching on these sites started to wade, as it felt like I wasn’t accomplishing anything. Staffing agencies would contact me, I would send my resume but never hear from them again. 

I was to learn, early on, that employees at these recruiting agencies made their money by how many resumes they put in the system. After learning that it became clear that that is what was going on. Some employees would be like ‘I have this great opportunity for you - please send me your resume’, without discussion or even telling me what the opportunity was. I had others who would at least fake an interest in helping me find work. They would end the short discussion with ‘please send me your resume’, then I would never hear from them again. 

Conveniently wisdom is that people obtain most of their jobs through contacts - networking is the number one way to find a new job. That tends to be difficult for introverted people, like myself, so I tend to stick with the jobsite.

I also learned that companies tend to want to hire within the company but there’s a requirement (law?) that the job needs to be posted for everyone. So sometimes there is a job posted that already has an applicant hired for it.

To get to the point of this article, I have noticed a lot of job postings that were posted 30+ days ago. I just assumed that the recruiting office had just gotten busy and forgot to remove it. I have come to find out that this posting could actually have been left on purpose, in what is called “ghost job postings”.

According to Gemini Google AI: 

A "ghost job posting" is a job advertisement for a position that an employer has no real intention of filling. Companies post these phantom roles for various reasons, such as building a pipeline of candidates, creating the impression of company growth for investors, or gathering information about the talent market. These postings can be frustrating for job seekers, as they waste applicants' time and can be misleading about the company's actual hiring needs. 

This goes along with the Staffing Agency, only with the “ghost job posting” they do not have to contact any applicants directly.

In Conclusion

I would like to conclude with this: it’s taken me a long time to realize this – we, as the job applicant, are not the only ones to be evaluated. When I was young I was told to pay attention to everything, when I went on an interview. I did this but since I needed the job I would just put that to the side.

Companies are being evaluated as well – from how the front desk treats you, to how the building looks. Now we can add, how a company does its job posting – are they considering the job searchers and our time?