Ghost listings & off-market jobs

One beautiful weekend morning, I spent some time researching questions related to finding a new job. As it would be very difficult to create a survey myself and send it out to hiring managers and job seekers myself - I must depend on publications I find online.?

I started with three areas - responsiveness, off market jobs and ghost listings. Once I really considered it I decided to focus on the second two - off market jobs and ghost listings - because the more I think about it, responsiveness of a company doesn’t matter as a candidate cannot control this about a company. Being able to notice ghost listings and determine the validity of off market jobs is way more important for the job seeker.

Let’s begin with ghost listings.

Ghost listings are the bane of any dedicated job seeker. A ghost listing is a job posting done by a company that has no intention of hiring right away nor telling you that is what they are doing.?

In a 2022 Survey by Clarify Capital - 1 in 10 managers has had a job posting open for over 6 months and 50% of managers keep job postings open because they are “always open to new people”.?

It only gets worse when you look at research in 2024 conducted by Resume Builder.

“Forty-percent of companies said they have posted a fake job listing this year, according to a survey in May of 650 hiring managers from career site Resume Builder. Three in 10 companies currently have fake listings on their sites or on job boards, according to the survey. “

THIS IS HORRIBLE! 40% of companies have posted a fake job this year! Any job seeker would be so frustrated by this information. But what can be done?

Possible Workaround

It would be impossible to know the intentions of the company posting a job, however you can look for patterns. Keep track of all of the job postings you are applying to including the title and description. If you see the same job posting over and over again by the same company, it is a red flag. That company either doesn’t know how to hire very well or you have just identified a ghost listing.?

Now onto the off market jobs

If you have spent any time listening to influencers that talk about the job market, many of them will quote the “80% of jobs are never listed”. Interestingly enough, this number is not something new. It has been quoted in books and articles going all the way back to the 1970s!

There is no way that still applies in 2024. The ease and cheapness for a company to post a job in 2024 compared to having to pay to run an ad in the newspaper pre-internet, makes this stats unlikely. Even though it is quoted quite often. Even NPR in 2011 with this article, A Successful Job Search: It's All About Networking : NPR.?

Networking

With that being said, depending on the type of job you are looking for, networking is probably the answer. For example, if you are looking for a high level executive position within organized real estate, most associations and MLSs are too small to do a proper search. That leads to free national job boards or even just local job boards in hopes of their next executive. If you aren’t networking, you would probably miss openings such as these.

Networking for Introverts

You may not know this about me, but I am an introvert. I hate putting myself out there to anyone I don’t know and that makes cold outreach to new companies difficult. One suggestion I’ve been given is to try to get informational meetings with employees at the companies you want to work at. Learn more about what it is like to work at that company. You may find out that you don’t actually want to work there, or you may find a new connection that will refer you to a job at the company in the future.

Conclusion

It can be extraordinarily hard to find the job you are looking for in this day and age between the amount of ghost listings and the need to network to get your next job - job searching has become a full time gig. Oh and don’t forget to mention, the most recent national jobs report released on August 2, 2024, shows only 114,000 nonfarm payroll employment. Well below the annual average for 2024 of approx. 200,000 per month. Even if companies show they are hiring, less of them are actually doing so with the average number of employment per month dropping every year since 2022.?

Bonus

After sharing the draft of this article with a friend of mine (who happens to help people find new jobs) I discovered that some companies are making the conscious decision not to publish their jobs online. Their reasoning is simple, they are going to go back to the old way of doing things - posting the job only on their website and to ask their employees for referrals.?

Why would companies do such a thing? Because as much as job seekers are tired of applying to jobs with hundreds of other applicants, these companies are tired of reading through hundreds of resumes to discover most of the candidates are not even remotely qualified for the position.