I've been applying constantly, I've got references, I have previous work experience, I got resume help what can I possibly be doing wrong
ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
155 points (100.0% liked)
askchapo
22994 readers
633 users here now
Ask Hexbear is the place to ask and answer ~~thought-provoking~~ questions.
Rules:
-
Posts must ask a question.
-
If the question asked is serious, answer seriously.
-
Questions where you want to learn more about socialism are allowed, but questions in bad faith are not.
-
Try [email protected] if you're having questions about regarding moderation, site policy, the site itself, development, volunteering or the mod team.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
the last time I was applying for jobs I created a spreadsheet to keep track of all the relevant information. I applied to just shy of 2000 listings. I got 3 phone calls, only one of which led to 3 separate interviews with 12 different people and totaled about 6 hours of my time. they hired internally
I think most job listings are fake. For one, I think most companies set up a job posting service and just ignore it until they actually need someone and don't have any candidates from in-person referrals. So the jobs get posted repeatedly or updated every few months and that's it. None of those positions are actually vacant. It's in the interest of job board companies to make it seem like they have a lot of jobs and information. Part of their model is collecting and selling data about jobs markets. So they're incentivized to have ghost listings everywhere because they don't investigate or discount fake listings. It all helps their internal numbers.
I wouldn't be surprised if the government got lazy and started relying on these job listing companies for market data. Which means there's a big bomb of shit data rolling around in stats, convincing people that there is more activity in the market than there is.
This isn't just a theory.
Many, maaaaany companies openly admit to posting fake job listings, ghost jobs, and your explanations of why they do this are pretty much spot on.
https://www.newsweek.com/ghost-jobs-rise-1924351
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240315-ghost-jobs-digital-job-boards
https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/ghost-job-listings-on-the-rise-how-to-spot-avoid-experts/485494
It is of course difficult to get accurate numbers because of regional / industry variance, which platform are you looking for jobs on, and oh of course those job seeker platforms are highly incentivized to not let their users know how prevalent this is...
But uh yeah, between these 3 fairly recent articles, we've got somewhere between 20% to 60% of companies admitting they post ghost jobs / number of actual job listings that are fake.
Yeah. Its really fucking bad, obviously for job seekers, and also in other ways (which you also correctly surmised) because it makes many metrics other companies and policy planners and econ data all fucked... normally, job openings are... you know, correlated to actual hirings?
Yeah thats all broken now, has been for years.
This phenomenon really kicked in to high gear during and after covid.
In fact, probably a whole lot of the Dems 'the economy is fine actually, stop complaining' rhetoric is because they were too stupid to realize this has been going on and have been relying on bullshit metrics.
Its one thing that they're unrelatable policy nerd wonks who have 0 charisma, can't read the room, nor actually do effective messaging.... its another thing that they are also incompetent data dorks.
(I am an unsociable autist data nerd with a degree in econ and career in data analytics myself... and thus this is personal for me lol)