1 in 5 job listings either fake or never filled

The Wall Street Journal, citing internal data from a hiring agency, reports that one in five job listings never result in a job being gotten. They're either left unfilled or the listings are simply fake. As summarized by Gizmodo, the Journal story illustrates the grim numbers with the story of Serena Dao, who searched for a job for over a year, applying to hundreds before realizing that many of the positions were not actually available. Its a form of PR, a huge waste of time for applicants, an indicator of various forms of fraud, and a growth tangent for AI.

Some onlookers have speculated that the practice of posting such advertisements is actually a corporate strategy designed to make the businesses posting them seem like they're growing when, in fact, they're not. Fast Company writes that this practice may help companies "feign active hiring and growth" and helps the "C-suite hit quarterly goals without the negative perception of removing jobs from their career sites." Another commentator for Forbes notes that ghost jobs can inflate "the true number of jobs in the market and elongates the job search, much to the frustration of many job seekers."

A good name for an account that identifies and snitches on such listings would be "Steve's fake jobs."

That companies complain about jobseekers using AI to automate their applications is funny when you consider what they are doing. "It's our prerogative to flood the commons," they're saying. "The machines are for us."