The heartbreak of not getting a job after putting a lot of time and effort into applying has been compounded by the revelation that the position may not even have existed in the first place.
A terrible trend of so-called “ghost job” adverts has emerged across Australia, crushing the aspirations of applicants who believed they had the attributes and a good chance of landing the role.
Ghost jobs are advertised positions that the employer has no intention of filling or that have already been filled.
Misled Australians have flocked to social media to express their anger at the time they waste applying for jobs that don’t exist.
One job seeker submitted 33 applications in two months, resulting in only two interviews.
“I don’t want to hear anyone say ‘no one wants to work’, these companies don’t hire,” they wrote in X.
A telltale sign that an advertised position may be a ghost job is if the ad has been posted for more than 30 days, said labor commentator Ben Hamer. National ABC Radio.
The heartbreak of not getting a job that a person invested a lot of time and effort into has been compounded by the revelation that the job may not have even existed in the first place (file image)
According to Hamer, employers “can’t afford to go months and months without someone having a job.”
But they can afford to play on people’s emotions by advertising jobs that are not available.
“What a lot of companies do, especially recruiters, is they put jobs on (recruitment sites) because the more jobs they have, if they have the budget, the smaller companies can’t compete,” Superior’s Graham Wynn. Recruiting people said Yahoo.
It’s a ploy that companies use to always have their jobs appear first and then push the smallest ones down the page, helping them get the best candidates for their genuine jobs.
Large companies typically purchase a package for a certain number of ads, and if they don’t have enough jobs to use the slots, they may simply run “fake” ads to fill the gaps.
Some recruiters also use fake job ads as a marketing tool to make themselves appear to be experts in a particular area and bigger than they really are.
This could lead people looking to do business in that area to call them instead of a company they consider smaller or with less expertise.
Some ghost jobs exist for legal reasons, Wynn said.
He gave the example of a company that had to advertise a job opening online because it wanted to demonstrate that it was open to hiring an external candidate.
But the reality was that the company had already filled the position internally.
Large companies often buy a package for a certain number of ads, and if they don’t have enough jobs to use the slots, they may simply run “fake” ads to fill the gaps (stock image).
Sometimes job ads remain online even after the position has been filled in case the person hired changes their mind or because the company wants to see what type of candidates are available for future vacancies.
Dr. Hamer said another clue that a job might not really exist is if the wording in the ad is not specific.
‘If it seems like (the advert) is a bit vague, then it’s potentially a ghost job. If you are quite specific, it gives the impression that there is a genuine role they are trying to play.
‘In some of them it may be that the recruitment process was simply delayed. But a good portion of them are (positions) that should never have been filled in the first place.’
