Unemployment is rising and jobs are scarce, bad news for those of us who will suffer from the downturn. If you're feeling the chill winds of recession, business failures and job cuts, how do you ferret out new opportunities?
With some difficulty in 2024, it would seem. The facile suggestion from politicians is that getting a new gig is a simple matter of sorting out a curriculum vitae (CV) and showing up for job interviews.
As anyone who has lived through times of high unemployment knows, it was difficult enough then with paper CVs, writing compelling cover letters and going through nerve-wracking interviews, hoping you were dressed right and sounded somewhat coherent.
In today's tech-dominated world, there are several more layers of complexity to deal with.
Stories are appearing, again, about "ghost jobs". San Francisco's SFGate wrote last week about what appears to be the latest scourge to hit tech workers who are already feeling the squeeze with massive redundancies ravaging the sector.
What are "ghost jobs" then? Meta/Facebook's classic "inauthentic behaviour" term is perfect for this. "Ghost jobs" are advertised for positions that do not exist. Apparently, some employers post them to build a talent pool, but also as psyops against staff, to help gauge how replaceable employees are. And, to make employees aware they are replaceable.
Some "ghost jobs" are basically public relations stunts, to make it look like companies are growing and hiring, or to make staff under the pump think help is arriving to assist with excessive workloads.
That's all very elaborate, and it didn't sound quite right. The companies behind the surveys quoted for the story are "resume builder" ones that aren't household names; it just seemed odd that a bunch of hiring managers and recruiters would gladly do surveys on what is essentially a very unethical practice that if it occurs, would demoralise jobseekers in large numbers.
After all, what's the point of applying for jobs if they're not real? Would recruiters and employers really want to shoot themselves in the foot with both barrels like this?
Checking in with five large recruitment companies for this piece, four didn't even respond. One said they've heard of the phenomenon, but didn't wish to comment on it. This is a very unusual response from an industry that loves to bombard you with statistics on everything to do with employment and careers, and you would expect them to know all there is to know about "ghost jobs".
In May this year, Above The Law wrote about the issue, saying "depending on who you ask, the prevalence of ghost jobs is either rare or common." Jobseekers who are already having to paying close attention to online ad details to avoid being scammed would love to know what's what here.
If "ghost jobs" are a thing, checking how long the position's been advertised for is a good idea. A job that's being going for a long time might not be for a real position, ditto those ads in which a company demands impossible to meet qualifications and experience from candidates. Some jobs have to be advertised for a raft of reasons like regulation, but the organisations in question might have someone in mind already and that person isn't you.
An AI avalanche of applications
What became apparent after talking to acquaintances who hire staff is that they often get swamped with electronically generated and transmitted applications.
One Auckland development house received hundreds of applications for a senior position, many of which were not at all relevant for the job. A genuine jobseeker whose qualifications and experience would otherwise fit could easily be drowned out in such a flood.
It would also be interesting to see research on the effect of professional-social network LinkedIn's one-click job applications which anecdotally "have destroyed the entry level software engineer market" (logging to Bsky might be needed) due to the thousands of messages they create. How do you stand out in a digital field of 10,000 or more?
Well, there's artificial intelligence for that, and as Korn Ferry notes, recruiters use it to among other things, volume screen applications.
Nothing is unbiased, least of all AI which is developed by humans and trained on our thoughts. The classic story here is Amazon training its AI recruiting tool on CVs submitted to the company, only to realise the system had taught itself to discriminate against women applications. In theory, AI's superior pattern matching abilities should make it a great recruitment tool. In practice, training AI on mostly men's CVs and applications, because the tech industry is very male dominated, meant anything with "women" in it was penalised. (The AI tool and the team behind it were disbanded in 2017).
Recruiters and hiring managers aren't the only ones who can use AI of course. If you have a techie bent and are looking for a new job, here's the free Python-based Auto_Jobs_Applier_AIHawk which is "a cutting-edge automated tool designed to revolutionise the job search and application process."
"In today's fiercely competitive job market, where opportunities can vanish in the blink of an eye, this programme offers job seekers a significant advantage. By leveraging the power of automation and artificial intelligence, Auto_Jobs_Applier_AIHawk enables users to apply to a vast number of relevant positions efficiently and in a personalised manner, maximising their chances of landing their dream job," as Federico Elia, a computer science graduate from the University of Genoa, Italy, wrote.
It looks like AI Hawk can manage around 17 job applications per hour, which is pretty impressive. It looks like it works with large language models from OpenAI and Google, as well as the Ollama project (you need an application interface programming (API) key for AI Hawk.)
Hiring or looking for work? Please post about your experience in the comments below.
4 Comments
Just from anecdote, in recent years anytime I've listed for a work position online, there's a deluge of applicants (like over 100), most living far away, with little to no relevant experience or qualifications. The whittle down process is pretty tedious.
My best hires have always been people I already knew, knew their abilities, personality, and their approach to work.
I applied for a bunch of jobs recently in government agencies. For most there was a response delayed by several months and then a similar email saying they had 150 applications (or similar number).
Got a call for an interview this week after several months.
Anyway, I got another job already but the market is very tough at the moment.
As always, real life contacts and networks are the most important, so try to cultivate those in the good times.
"...it just seemed odd that a bunch of hiring managers and recruiters would gladly do surveys on what is essentially a very unethical practice that if it occurs, would demoralise jobseekers in large numbers."
To paraphrase Mencken: no one ever went wrong overestimating the psychopathy of HR / People & Culture staff jobsworths without real line management responsibilities.
Thankfully I've now been well out of the corporate world for a decade.
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