• A specific position exists, and there’s work available for it.
• The person hired could start within 30 days.
• The business is actively recruiting outside workers for it.

• Amazon Example: Last year, a leaked internal report from Amazon (seen by Engadget) showed they had a staff turnover rate of 150%.
• Think about that: Amazon has 1.6 million employees, but they had to hire 2.4 million people in a year just to keep their workforce the same size!
• Adding to this, only about one-third of Amazon’s new hires stuck around for more than 90 days before leaving (quitting, fired, or laid off).
• With that much churn, companies often don’t even bother taking down job listings once someone is hired. People are coming and going from warehouse jobs so fast, hundreds of thousands of positions just stay listed as “open” across the country.

Intentional Deception: Sometimes, companies post jobs they have no real plan to fill, especially for higher-level positions.

• Another Amazon Example (AWS): An internal document reviewed by Business Insider revealed that Amazon Web Services (AWS) posted 25,000 job openings in 2022 for their utility computing team. But, get this, only 7,800 of those positions were actually approved to be filled!
• This happened in a year when Amazon was actually laying off more staff than they were hiring overall.

The Strategy: Companies, particularly in top tech, finance, and consulting, use this tactic to constantly keep positions open. The goal? To attract and find top talent. If someone applies who isn’t considered “overqualified” or exactly the perfect fit, they just get rejected.

Why They Do It:

• It works for them.
• It’s not illegal for private companies. (Amazon just happens to be less good at keeping their internal papers secret than others!)
• But it makes the job opening numbers you hear about in the media – like the Jolts number, currently around 9,610,000 (it was slightly higher at 9,616,000 back in May) – really inaccurate and inflated.

Unemployment Numbers Also Hide Things: Just like job openings, the number of people counted as “unemployed” can be misleading.

• The official 6.5 million unemployed people only get counted if they meet strict rules:
  • They don’t have a job.
  • They have actively looked for work in the prior four weeks.
  • They are currently available to start work.
• According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are another 5.4 million people who want a job but aren’t counted because they don’t tick all those boxes.
• So, you might think it’s the easiest time ever to get a job, but the official numbers don’t tell the whole story. It’s more like over 11 million people wanting jobs versus the misleading 9.6 million openings.

Remote Work Adds a Layer: If you’re lucky enough to have a full-time remote job, it’s changed things a lot. You can look for opportunities anywhere. Companies want to keep up, so a common trick is to post the same remote job listing in every major city.

• This gives them a wider pool of applicants to choose from and be more selective since you don’t need to come into the office anyway. It can be good for both sides sometimes.
• But for someone looking for a job, it makes it look like there are way, way more opportunities out there than there truly are.

Ghost Jobs (The Main Event): The remote job city trick ties into the second big reason people can’t find jobs: They’re chasing ghost jobs. These are jobs that are advertised, but the company has zero intention of ever actually hiring someone for that role.

Why Companies Post Ghost Jobs: It’s not just random; they do it for specific business reasons:

• Build a Talent Database: In today’s world, having a huge list of workers in your industry, complete with their applications and resumes, is super valuable. If a position really needs to be filled later, hiring managers can dip into this database and call promising past applicants. It might even involve “poaching” someone from their current job, but that can still be cheaper than starting a brand new search from scratch.
• Gather Business Intelligence: By collecting applications for jobs that don’t exist, companies get almost free information about their competition. They can learn things like: how many staff competitors have, how much they’re paying, how many employees are leaving, and what skills workers in their industry have (or don’t have). All for the price of posting the job on LinkedIn or Indeed. That’s a lot of info for cheap!
• Manage Existing Overworked Employees: Managers sometimes post ghost jobs just to keep their current staff happy. They can tell their overworked team members that new help is coming “as soon as we find the right person.”
• Look Good to Investors and Customers: Posting jobs makes the business look like it’s growing and expanding, even if it’s not. It’s a really effective strategy for businesses.

How Common Are They? A survey by Clarify Capital talked to 10,000 hiring managers. Over 60% admitted their job postings had been active for more than two months. This is even though 96% of employers claim in their job ads they’re trying to fill the role quickly.

The Impact: For job hunters, this means you can spend hundreds of hours applying, tailoring resumes, and even going to interviews for roles that were never actually going to be filled. It’s frustrating!

Tech Changed Things: Businesses embraced new technology that makes it easier to train people for certain roles, but it also made the people in those roles easier to replace.

• Old vs. New Jobs: Think about jobs like a pharmacist or a bank manager. They used to be highly respected, required years of experience, and paid really well (like doctors or lawyers).
  • A pharmacist needed complex knowledge to mix prescriptions.
  • A bank manager made important decisions about who got loans.
  • These were big, risky jobs where mistakes could cost a lot. Companies needed to find good people and keep them, so it was normal for people to stay with one company their whole career and be rewarded well for it.
• Today: Pharmacists mostly check for compliance and hand out pre-made drugs that a computer tells them to. Bank managers use credit scores and computer programs to decide loans; they often have no personal say.
• The Result: These jobs got easier, but the people doing them became easier to replace. So, companies stopped valuing employees sticking around. They stopped rewarding loyalty.

Employees Learned to Switch: Now, the tables have turned. People who don’t switch jobs are often the ones getting left behind. Studies show that people who switch jobs every 2 years or so, on average, earn 50% more than their peers who stay loyal to one company. Because of this, people have learned that switching jobs is how you get ahead.

Companies Don’t Want to Train: Since people are more likely to switch jobs after a few years, companies often don’t want to spend money training new employees. They figure the person might leave anyway. This means they primarily want to hire people who already have all the exact skills and experience needed for the job. Finding these perfect candidates can be tough.

Burden on Employees: A lot of today’s workers are forced to train themselves to stay employable. They take Excel courses, coding boot camps, sales training, and now even AI seminars – all on their own dime and time. Plus, more jobs require advanced degrees, like needing an MBA for an entry-level analyst position.

Companies “Win” Either Way:

• If companies can find people with all the required skills and high standards, they win by not having to pay for training.
• If they can’t find them, they still win because they get to complain about how hard it is to find workers with the right skills.

The H-1B Connection: This complaining about skill gaps can even be used to justify outsourcing work or hiring skilled workers on H-1B visas. H-1B visa holders depend on their employer to stay in the U.S. If they lose their job, they typically only have 60 days to find a new job with a different company willing to sponsor their visa before they have to leave the country. So, companies have a strong reason to make it look like they can’t find local workers so they can hire employees who are much more dependent on them. It’s a messed-up system that’s bad for both American workers and visa holders, but great for companies that want loyal staff while everyone else is job-hopping for better pay.

Keeping it Quiet: Remember, companies usually don’t want to publicly admit they’re having trouble finding staff unless there’s a benefit for them. Telling investors that staffing issues could hurt growth or operations would likely send their stock price down. So, a CEO has a legal duty to keep quiet about that kind of info unless spinning it somehow helps the company.