“Hey, anybody seen a ghost?” – Ghostbusters
Do vegan zombies shamble around moaning “graaaaains”?
If I were a kid looking for work today, I’d be pissed.
By one study, at least 60% of jobs listed on job posting sites are as fake as the girl in Canada my friend kept talking about. One survey had 81% of recruiters admitting that they posted ghost jobs. They never existed, and never will exist. This is a little like thinking you have a blind date with a girl and then finding out it’s actually Michelle Obama.
Why on Earth would they do that? Not the whole “dating Michelle Obama” thing, but the fake jobs . . .
Why?
Well, several reasons:
- People in HR are evil like a cat and enjoy the thought of torturing their prey,
- To fake that the company is growing,
- Because it’s Tuesday and they’re bored,
- To get resumes to compare against existing staff,
- Looking for hot chicks to apply, and
- Trolling for resumes to show that there’s a need for infinity H-1B visa holders to come on over from India with fake credentials and take the job at $7.35 an hour.
I would mop, but floors are beneath me. (meme as found)
To top it off, the system is rigged: often, when a job does appear, the hiring manager wrote the description for a specific person, i.e., a person who isn’t you, and although it has already been filled, the description has to be posted because “rules”. It’s a fair competition, exactly like the “who is the best boy” competition I entered and my mom was the judge.
Seriously, though, how could she pick the neighbor kid?
When I got my very first job, it was because my brother already worked at the place. My second job? Because I played football with the boss’s kid in high school. When hired for my first job out of college, my employer knew details they could only have learned from conversations with my professors or the NSA.
Since then, nearly every job that I’ve had has been as a result of someone knowing me, picking up the phone, and calling me because they wanted me in the role. I am very lucky to have gotten in that groove – the main way I’ve gotten jobs is due to a friend or other connection.
What is the only approved North Korean drink size? The supreme liter.
But first you have to have a friend.
Kids these days?
Not so much. The meme was, “Go in, give ‘em a firm handshake, and tell ‘em you want the job.”
In many places, that’s simply not possible. Many corporations only take job applications online. And, if the resume doesn’t have the right keywords to get plucked out of the luminiferous aether of the digital world by an A.I. on its lunch break, it goes into the black pit of resume despair, from which no word will ever be heard, only faint moaning and the rustling of paperclips.
Your mother is so ugly she went into a haunted house and came out with a job application. (news article as found)
Ghost jobs make it worse, somehow. When tech was busy laying of hundreds of thousands of coders so they could import the population of Mumbai instead, there were job listings aplenty. These kids, getting ready to graduate from college, didn’t know anyone, yet there were thousands of (apparently) available jobs.
How could they fail?
The big lie is that those jobs were never really real, and of the ones that were real, each of them would get somewhere (depending on the job) between 250 and 1,000 applications. In a realistic world, probably 20% of the applications were a good fit. So, that means that for every job, there were likely between 50 and 200 people that could do the job with enough skill to make the hiring company happy.
But only one person gets the job.
I were ever interviewing to become a waiter and they asked me if I was qualified I’d say, “I bring a lot to the table.” (meme as found)
I have written in the past about the keys to the devolution of the country – popular immiseration being one of those keys. In order for that unrest that leads to collapse to occur, people need to be not uncomfortable, not unhappy, but miserable with no visible way out.
Because, after all as the songwriter wrote: freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.
Men need a job. Men need a purpose. They have to have this as much as they have to have oxygen. Give them a soft life, give them all the material comforts, give them video games and weed, and they are still miserable. They have to have a purpose, and the most common way to have a purpose is to have a job that matters.
Without it, men are miserable.
Now, consider the exceptionally capable. Not the Elon Musks. Not the very top elite, but exceptionally capable people who would have been great mid to upper mid management for IBM™ back in 1966. Those people used to be, while not the spark plug, but maybe the timing chain of the economy. Necessary, but not the folks that are going to start a business.
But replacement is a myth. (as found)
We have entered, perhaps, the era where exceptionally capable and exceptionally qualified people exist in numbers beyond where they are useful. There are simply too many people who can program now for it to be especially profitable – the advice I gave both of my boys was simple: never get a degree where you’ll be competing against a billion people for a job.
Programmers now have to find something new.
Maybe they should learn to mine coal? No, that’s shut down. Maybe they should become journalists? Not, those are being fired faster than they’re produced. The world that we’re moving into won’t particularly value many of the things that these young people spent years learning.
That’s bad enough. But now, dangle a ghost job where they’d be the perfect candidate in front of them, and let them apply for it and experience the frustration of a poodle pawing at a plastic porkchop?
Are you trying to radicalize them?
I mean, that’s probably what happened to Barack . . .
My former employer did this routinely on internal job postings and used it as a way to launder DEI hires.
I saw this first hand with four of my highly qualified coworkers who all had 20+ yrs of experience and were unanimously selected by hiring teams for the respective jobs, only to get overruled by senior management. A young, inexperienced female or minority would always get the job instead (often without even participating in the interview process). To add insult to injury, a couple of these guys were then told that they would have to train the new managers. All four left the company.
As word got out, most white males just quit applying for any sort of internal management positions which just accelerated the inversion (not to mention the exodus of capable people). I opted to retire early once it became clear that no one in my DEI based management chain had even the slightest clue as to what we were supposed to be doing.
J Bird
Jeez, man, your story is so familiar I could have written it myself. I am very recently retired (early) from my employer, a Big Three defense contractor that is so committed to DEI that there is a mandate for achieving 50% female management, corporate-wide, by 2030. Quite a bonanza for all the 30-something midwit affirmative action hires who will stab one another in the back for those $200k positions, without any interference from competent pale males.
Never having had any interest in management (I refused to be responsible for anyone’s miserable performance but my own) I was spared the agony and frustration of being passed over for having the wrong skin tone or plumbing. But I sure saw it happen again and again to others. My decision to retire just last month was prompted by the fact that my manager announced his decision to leave by May 1st, and the short list of replacements would have had me answering to one of those 30-something midwit affirmative action hires.
Convergence destroys because it kills competency while worshiping another god . . .
Hello. To paraphrase the Sex Pistols Ever get the feeling you’ve been had?
If I was King or DJT First Edict would be: were opening up all the mines boys
and all the other stuff they said we did not need.
And putting an income tax of 85% on women who were in the age range of fertility. And no welfare. And no child support.
From Drudge / WSJ today. Somehow this has more of a feeling of a nation in dire straits rather than a rejuvenation….
https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/skilled-trades-high-school-recruitment-fd9f8257
Yes, this is the way.
Not a new graduate, but currently living the “resume and cover letter into a black hole” reality. Being an older white dude doesn’t help (thanks to DEI being a cancer that has metastasized at the Blue-Haired Land Whale HR level – and isn’t going anywhere soon). I was going to reinvent myself as ShaNayNay Shontell Jackson and then brow-beat anyone who dared tell me what I could and couldn’t identify as … but then realized it would be stupid as I couldn’t work for a company that filled with utter retards anyway.
I think there are a LOT of ghost jobs. There was a job advertised that was basically a copy of my (rather diverse) resume with all of the “requirements” for the job – and even the “nice to have” qualifications – being what I had listed as experience and skills. This was a unicorn job. I can imagine that there are maybe 2-3 people in the country with this exact mix of qualifications … yet … not a peep from the hiring company. But then, I realized that the company had just received a huge Gummint contract and the odds were 99.99% there were DEI hiring requirements attached to those funds. I don’t think there are many ShaNayNay Jacksons with extensive VR game development experience who also happen to be experts on the Minuteman III Nuclear ICBM system and it’s documentation and maintenance protocols … but I guess they found her.
“Idiocracy”(2005) wasn’t supposed to be a documentary or an instruction manual.
They didn’t. It was written for someone they had in mind. There never was a job there that anyone but that single person could get.
I can second and confirm the resume flood situation. My wife is one of those evil HR cat women from Mars ( be of cheer though, I’m HER punishment) and over an example weekend she received nearly seven hundred resumes for a posted IT position. The majority of these were from various Sanjay Reddy Guptas and the order and composition of the resumes themselves were obvious copies, down to misspellings even. Probably issued from the same mud brick university that their invariable “Masters Degree” came from.
All this amounts to jamming noise, it floods the space where real and decent fits for the position can now not be matched up. It’s just another corrosive being poured on our society that will force the cracks wider and on toward failure.
There’s a lot of problems with the JOLTS data (it’s tremendously politically biased and always ridiculously revised several months after this month’s juiced headlines are forgotten) , but whattayagonnado? It’s a starting point.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.a.htm
Year over year, total March job openings are down 10% and job hires are down 2% year-over-year – and we’re still debating over whether or not we’re in recession. Federal job listings are down 40% YoY (thanks, DOGE) and only mining / logging job openings have dropped by more at 60%. Construction job openings down over 25%, real estate and heath care job openings down by around 20%, food service job openings and state / local government jobs down by around 15%.
Add in the reality of ghost jobs in the pool that remains after such cuts in the overall job listings? Tough times indeed.
Yup, And you still have to know someone.
My son got sucked into that void. The wife and I advised him repeatedly to get a degree in anything other than computer XYZ so he wouldn’t have to compete with a billion dot-Indians for a job. We even tried to get him in a blue-collar job training program – but he insisted on following his dream. And now he sits, picking up some gig work here and there but nothing permanent. I spent more than a little time trolling job sites looking for work to match his degree – 1000’s of jobs listed but no response from any of them. We sent 100’s of resumes and nothing. Big fat nothing. I went down the rabbit hole on more than several and my take was that job placement agencies place a lot of the “ghost jobs” in order to get people on their roster. You know, the places that’ll get you employed somewhere but take 40% of your paycheck for the first 2 years as payment for finding you a job. A lot of the jobs listed were shoddy cut-n-paste specials, same language but different locations to widen the net. I got to a point where I could recognize those right off and could spend all day looking at various sites and never see an original or unique job posting – 100% fake and gay ghost listings. We’ve basically lost several generations and our existing blue-collar workforce is aging out.
Exactly. But he’s not too late to change . . . .
We’ve no tech or industrial base in our small, resort area metro (70-75K). Most shops/restaurants have a sign in a window begging for wait staff or clerks. That’s it. But, this ghost jobs thing is news to me but makes sense.
20-25 years ago, you’d buy a Sunday Metro newspaper, read the Jobs/Personnel Wanted ads and mail your resume to ones that interested you. Today, it’s all internet, where most postings are fake & gay, I gather?
Johnny doesn’t want to go to Greenville Tech and get an AA in CNC programming. He wants to go to Carolina or Clemson, get an engineering degree, and discover that after being hired, he has to attend night school at Greenville Tech to get hands-on training.
And how’d Johnny get that job? Connections.
Yup. Connections.
In my younger days, I found job-hunting more psychologically torturous than dating. It felt like begging and it humbled my overactive ego like no girl ever did. It seemed that everyone wanted “experience” which begged the obvious question, How does anyone break into the field in the first place?
The answer, in my case at least, was ‘networking’. More aptly known as ‘nepotism’. It is no exaggeration to say that every job I’ve ever held, save one, came through a connection – family member, friend, future in-law, etc. The only one I ever got by walking in cold was a stint as a bouncer at a rowdy nightclub while I was in college, and I owed that success to the glorious gift of genetics and years spent chiseling my physique in the gym. Multiple college degrees? Not so helpful, sad to say.
My long-time employer swept my inexperienced arse in on a referral, and in gratitude I gave them decades of loyal service. More than anything else, though, I became a lifer because the very thought of going through the painful process of trying to sell myself to a potential new employer made me shudder. That, and inertia were all it took to make a company man out of this former rebel.
When it came time for my sons to enter the working world, I was largely useless in advising them. I had been in my position at Warlabs, Inc, for 25 years, knew nothing of the modern, complicated dance between employer and prospective employee, and neither boy showed so much as the slightest inclination toward becoming a cube-dwelling wage slave like their old man. Ten years on, neither one is truly ‘settled’ in a career. But each has an extensive collection of name tags and hairnets*.
*h/t Wayne’s World
And that’s the issue – there simply aren’t enough jobs for the competent people out there.
Another reason that Company’s advertise non existent jobs is that the annual pay negotiations are coming up. They want to see what :”the market” rates are. In other words, you can be replaced by someone prepared to work for less than you arr being paid now. What are you going to do about it?
Phil B
Absolutely. They’re dredging for replacements.
There aren’t many or any ways that I envy young White men. The job market is just one aspect. The girl aspect is another. The housing market and the prospect for something approximating a decent middle class life is another. This is why in my humble opinion we are starting to see a radicalization shift among young White men who have simply had it with being blame for everything wrong in America.
Yes, and that’s good.
Even the technical courses were part of the big scam. I worked with young folks that bit on the carrot of something that has a very small turnover, and can be temporary at best. They received their two year degree, made strong efforts to find a job, and found there were a few thousand that also received their degree, were in the market, and only a handful of jobs were available in the future. I felt for them, but if they had really thought about it, examined the market, and made their decision on logic, they wouldn’t have wasted the money.
There are jobs for only so many underwater welders.
… and even then you’re at the whim of the .gov and whatever administration is in charge.
Ask me how I know.
Thankfully I can and have adapted.
-rightwingterrorist
Yup,
Many moons ago airlines started charging to process job applications for select positions, such as pilot. Then once in a while they would put out word that they were planning on hiring pilots and then wait for the cash to come in the mail.
And they already had their candidates picked from the Naval, Marine, and Air Force aviators.
I remember those days. Took my money and never heard a peep.
Learn to weld lol
Yes. This is (partly) the way.
And yet, as Mike Rowe has pointed out, Caterpillar’s heavy equipment repair internship has never filled all of its positions even once in the last thirty years, despite the fact that any kid with the aptitude and a GED can be making a six-figure income in two years after starting.
ZFG for the “kids who can’t find a job”.
They’re mostly lazy bastards who were never taught to take the hard, dirty-work, sh*tty jobs and work their asses off to succeed.
Somehow, the ones who aren’t lazy bastards all have jobs.
(The bigger bitch, IMHO, is that those who are working are making five times what their parents retired at, but inflation has made them poorer than Irish coal miners in Appalachia in 1880, in real terms. There’s a blog post or three in there, JW.)
I went to high school at a college-prep school, small classes, blah blah.
One of the kids I graduated was a solid C student, knew it, and never wasted one minute of even a junor college. But he loved working on cars, nice guy, and a total gear-head.
Went to work in an auto shop right out of high school.
Ran into him at my job (at the time) 10 years later.
He worked his way up, bought his boss’ shop.
Then bought another shop. Then another. Then another.
When I saw him last, he was 28, owned 10 repair shops around Los Angeles, and had a net worth over $1M.
And last I looked, you can’t fix a transmission for a car in L.A. from Mumbai or Hong Kong.
Witchcraft, right?
Fake jobs are asinine, but sadly real.
You aren’t getting a job from a job posting.
The only one I ever did, I quit within 90 days, because they were geared for hiring illegal alien h.s. drop-outs from Mexico.
Find/make/invent your own damned job, or train for one that can’t be exported.
Bonus points if you pick a field where competency still trumps DIE bullsh*t and quotas.
Video game player doesn’t pay anything, and international financier isn’t an entry-level position.
And excuses pay no bills.
These are all things your h.s. guidance counselor (who, it should be pointed out, was working a low-level white collar job for far less than your parents made, despite his college degree) never told you about.
Welcome to Reality.
And Word To Your Mother:
Don’t take career advice from someone who couldn’t make $100K/yr in the real job marketplace, and only took the teaching/school admin job for the easy schedule, healthcare benefits, and summers off. He/she was an idiot when you were 17, and he/she’s still an idiot now.
That’s The Way: jobs that have a physical component in the United States or have a qualification. I expect there soon will be people flocking there. Kids want to work, but need to find The Way.
Just flipping through channels and it seems the literal ghost job market is booming.
There were at least 4 different shows involving ghost hunters of some sort, a couple of shows where people were hunting for Bigfoot, a scientific based study of weird happenings at Skinwalker Ranch, and re-runs of MonsterQuest. Throw in the dozen or so shows that involve UFO’s and I’m beginning to wonder if college kids should consider a career in paranormal investigation instead.
Ohhhhh, I like that.