That position you just applied for might be a 'ghost job' that'll never be filled (2024)
www.theregister.com

... If you didn't hear back about that great-looking tech position you applied for, it might not be because there were too many applicants scrambling to find a job amid rolling layoffs. There's a distinct possibility the posting was fake to begin with.

We're talking here about "ghost jobs" a practice of posting openings for positions that are fake, already filled, or intended for internal applicants and only opened to the public for legal purposes.

This is no fringe phenomenon either, as Silicon Valley-adjacent news outlet SFGate discovered by chatting with some recruiters and looking at research from career and resume websites. To make matters worse, it's becoming increasingly prevalent in the tech industry as it slides into an era of perpetual layoffs, the publication concluded.

According to research published in August by MyPerfectResume, 81 percent of recruiters admitted to posting ghost jobs, with 41 percent saying half or more of the jobs they post are straight-up fake. Resume Builder similarly found by speaking to more than a thousand hiring managers that 40 percent of companies posted fake jobs in the past year, and that three in ten had active fake openings posted as of June, when it published its report. ...