Fake Jobs

:date: 2025-01-15 10:11

The US Bureau Of Labor Statistics publishes a report that tries to assess labor demand. For example, as of January 7, they say that there were 8.1 million US job openings.

This report also accounts for hires, which the same report lists as 5.3 million. Go ahead and stop here and spend five seconds thinking about this: 8 million job ads and 5 million people hired.

One possibility is that this data collection time period is seeing a massive growth in employment opportunities (i.e. presumably there were 5 million job ads in the last report). This is almost certainly not the case. Here's a chart from the same source showing that openings are indeed way higher than hires (and separations, which do roughly track).

So what's going on? The answer is fake job ads. Ghost jobs.

Here are some reasons I suspect this is being done.

Companies, especially startups and other investment seeking firms, want to give the impression that they are growing. By appearing to ramp up for the big situation the CEO has been talking up, the investment is more likely to pour in allowing that CEO to handsomely cash out. Department managers also may post bogus openings to appear busy and justify funding. They certainly want to be able to immediately spend funding if it is allocated.

Companies may have budgetary schemes or growth targets that try to hire in some structured way. They might list the openings even if they don't exactly have the funds to currently make the hire. Sort of a wishlist approach.

Sometimes companies are indeed shorthanded but not by much. They can simply overwork their current labor force. But if they just tell the those workers, "Oh hey, we're getting really busy these days but, no worries, we'll just overwork you to the greatest extent possible," that will probably backfire. Instead they can tell the current workforce, "We're going to hire tons of people to help you out! Because we're totally on your side and looking out for you. Isn't that great?" Only it's not because they're lying — or at best they have no real motivation to incur unnecessary expense by following through with hiring.

Sometimes an employee is desperately needed, an opening is posted, and hastily filled. But the company knows this hire is suboptimal. They'd really like a better candidate to come along and take the job. That can't happen unless the job ad stays up. Another variant is that they are trying to build a network of consulting or freelance workers without broadcasting as much to current employees, competitors, and/or stakeholders.

In the tech world, promising candidates are often given ridiculously difficult tests. I have personally witnessed this from the hiring side where the test consisted of especially thorny technical conundrums that the company was facing. They were basically hoping to use the free labor of the applicants to make technical progress. If I have seen this personally we probably should consider that this is a thing. I have taken many such tests as an applicant that seemed strangely difficult and specific to the "hiring" company's product.

Companies may post ads as a kind of survey of the labor market. How many people are interested in working for them is an indication of how much worse they can treat their current workforce. They can try various recruitment platforms to figure out which is best at generating good candidates. During mergers and acquisitions and relocation plans the planners may want to know what kind of labor force they can marshal. By stockpiling specific resumes over time, the company can have a direct access to a pool of candidates when they finally are really ready to hire.

These days, creepy data harvesting should be the default assumption for pretty much everything you do, including applying for a job. By preying on the natural desperation of job seekers, all sorts of unreasonably detailed data on regular people can be collected by shitty operations and used for the same nefarious purposes data like this usually is.

A company might cite "restructuring" as a reason that everyone will be changing jobs but really they're cutting head count. I once worked for a large research group that did this. They made job listings for everybody and told everyone they needed to reapply for the new positions. I was one of the people who got rehired as advertised but about half the people didn't get rehired and about half of those were replaced by new people. Note that those new people were hired based on a four to one ratio of job ads to actual hires. Like magic, cutting ten people shows up as hiring forty!

I suspect companies may sometimes post job ads to deceptively signal that they are ramping up some activity. For example, I remember seeing a lot of job ads for Apple's autonomous car program. They may have actually had a program or they wanted to simply gauge its feasibility and/or generate shareholder enthusiasm and/or strategically induce competitors to do something. In the tech world especially, it is common to see reports citing job ads as an indication of what the company is up to.

Decades ago when I first tried to get hired by a factory that exports PhDs to hang in Chinese offices, I had many very strange experiences. The most flagrant was a job interview for a "programmer" position where they brought me in to interview with a group of five people. Immediately something seemed off when they started describing the role — it was a Windows Server job requiring heavy knowledge of Windows, more Windows, exotic Windows, and only Windows. Not at all what the job ad said, e.g. no programming. Eventually I reached in my bag and pulled out a resume, slid it across the table and said, "Did you guys actually get a chance to have a look at my resume? Do you realize that I'm a Linux expert? I know nothing about Windows." The stupid look on their faces was surreal. They carried on with the "interview" while I sat there thinking what the fuck is wrong with these people? Later after working at the university for many years, I was able to reflect on that experience and understand it. It turns out that the university has very explicit hiring practices. Let's say you're the principal investigator for the "Collects Data In Excel" Lab. You have in mind a friend or relative or, most commonly, a grad student slave already in the lab doing the job for free and who is about to be released if you don't give them some compensation. You know exactly whom you want/need to hire. Not so fast! The university requires you to avoid cronyism and nepotism by interviewing N (something between 5 and 10) other candidates. It is obvious exactly how this will turn out. An "ideal" other candidate for the Excel job would be the Linux guy who conspicuously avoids mentioning Excel anywhere on his resume. I've had a couple of other interviews like this. It seems most likely to happen when there is a big group all present at the interview, as if it's a validating internal performance of some kind and I'm just a prop: "See how fair and reasonable we are to consider high quality outside talent? Unfortunately, he's a weird Linux guy. That's why when I promote Bob Sycophant to the job it will be totally merit based." At the other end of the professional spectrum, I suspect unions are another source of this kind of thing.

What should we make of this situation? Well, the main thing is to realize that if you're looking for a job, you should figure that nearly half of the postings you see are problematic and probably should be considered spurious. I think some industries are worse than others — tech is very, very bad. This insight also hints that you should be putting in an extra 40% more job applications than you had planned on. This takes the form of applying for other jobs even while you have a job — you know, just to see if they'll hire you and for how much. Clearly this chicanery is reasonable as the companies themselves are setting this standard of conduct.

Fortunately at this time I personally don't have to worry about this problem. But there is a related problem I do have to worry about and that is fake recruiters. Look, if you'd like me to work for you doing something you think I'd be a good fit for, yes. The answer is yes, I'll do it. Unless you're setting kids on fire, I don't even care what the job is or how much it pays. I'm basically a terrifically good sport and I pretty much will do anything for anybody who thoughtfully concludes that I'd make a valuable contribution to their team.

But! Here's the thing — if you don't know me and never even looked at my website or especially if you didn't even look at my resume, well, then no, you have no sensible basis to believe I'd be of any value to you. In other words, if you simply used a key word search and are now sending out requests to "hop on a call" to the thousands of people who came up in the results, well, that's not recruiting — it's spam.

It's bad enough for those who are proactively looking for a job that a huge percentage of the job listings are bullshit. But even when you're minding your own business "recruiters" will be constantly badgering you with the verisimilitude of recruiting while being categorically bogus. I have yet to have one respond sensibly to my response question "Why me?" They seem to not even understand the question. It is not a valid answer to say, "Uh, but this is a job listing and it contains some words in it that are also in your profile." As if I — a computer expert — couldn't find literally eight million such postings myself.

I get it. Resumes are boring and reading them sucks. The rare times a resume is interesting and exciting is if you personally need to hire an exotically skilled person who is describing such qualifications therein. How might we improve on mostly illiterate (its always "hop on a call") middlemen running keyword searches? Well, I know somebody who doesn't mind reading! Somebody who can read resumes all day and still catch every typo! Not only that, they can also generate a custom text explaining sensibly why they've chosen to reach out to you for this job opportunity.

The funny thing is that being able to see the cure to both of these problems (fake job ads and fake recruiters) is exactly the kind of exotic skill that should be pretty valuable these days. And yet our current system of making markets for labor is completely blind to such skill. I'm sure some techbros are hoovering up VC loot to, ostensibly, make this happen but it's already embarrassing for all involved that the transition from a natural lack of intelligence in recruiting to an AI approach has not already happened.