> Well I opened the article, near the beginning I saw the text: "81% of recruiters admitted to posting ads for positions that were fake or already filled."

I love San Francisco to death, but there's no reliable local newspaper. It drives me nuts.

I've done tech interviewing for years. Job listing that are to various degree fake are quite common. Of course, fakeness comes in many flavor, from listings posted just to "see if there's anyone out there" (I had a boss who did this regularly) to jobs a supervisor really does want to fill but which they know they won't because the bureaucracy has forced impossible requirements on them. An example: "Junior programmer, 10 years experience in language X" (that's existed for five years).

This is another personal anecdote, but I had an interview earlier this year for a database related role. The job ad had a huge salary range and the interview had nothing to do with the role. I wasn't asked any behavioral or technical questions. The two people on the call just wanted to get to know me. We probably spent several minutes talking about sports. A few days later I got rejected. What the hell?

You're supporting the wrong team?

I've also been hired after similar "non-interviews". Sometimes it's hard to know if it's just disorganisation/incompetence or if there's outright fakery going on.

or that they're already confident in technical ability and looking for a culture fit.

the interviewers are being paid to do interviews

Perhaps a higher layer of management had a headcount target they wanted to fill for some reason, but this team didn't actually want or need new people but were forced to go through the process anyway.

Most likely a green card application related sham job posting where they already have someone working in that position on a work visa for several years with experience with their internals and doing a good job, but the regulations force the company to post their job at several places, interview people and reject them for some plausible reason, while applying for a green card for that person. All this needs to be documented properly.

It's extremely common at most companies, including MFAANG, because it makes zero sense to layoff the incumbent and hire a brand new person.

https://old.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/jy5rcw/lpt_bec...

Facebook got caught.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/dec/03/facebook-...

One of the reasons might be that you belong to a protected category (by gender, age, race, etc). These interviews are sometimes referred to as "compliance interviews". These candidates will be reported on the HR diversity metrics to prove that the company made an effort to reach out to diverse candidates (even though no actual effort was made). A few companies (Wells Fargo I believe was one) were fined by the Feds for these practices.

Was your boss aware of the toll it takes to interview (well) on his own teams?

Oh, he never interviewed, just posted on craigslist and collected resumes. But the impact on us was important. One of the purposes of the exercise for him was being able to show me a list of people could supposedly do my job better, faster and cheaper.

He was a friend of a friend and one of the most unprincipled people I've ever gotten to actually know. But I assume there are many similar people higher in corporate hierarchies that I wouldn't ever know.

What is the benefit of knowing "that anybody is out there"? Subjective devaluation of current employees?

I took that to mean ”we don’t really need anyone right now, but if someone who is very good applies, we’ll hire them”.

Edit: Or maybe not, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42012035

devaluation, but also just knowing if we could replace people.

I have 5 Sr. Devs and if any of them split, how long would it take me to replace them? and at what rate? and what skillsets will they have and not have?

The really common reason in my experience is there is a job that is made to fit a specific internal applicant but it has to advertised “because of process”. Often the manager is not even telling recruiting that they have already picked the candidate.

Just to note. 80% of recruiters doesn't mean 80% of ads. A recruiter that has posted thousands of legitimate ads in their career, technically only needs to have posted 1 fake one to be eligible for inclusion in the 80%.

Although I understand, and to some extent share, your skepticism regarding the "study", I have no problem conceiving that a trend might currently be setting around the practice of posting fake ads, for whatever reason. It doesn't require much. In an unregulated playing field, simple peer pressure and survival is all you need to drive everyone to shady practices.

So, the study might be moot, but the number isn't so surprising.

This isn't new. Forbes also interviewed someone who made such a study.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/karadennison/2023/11/27/how-gho...

You probably need to pay to see their surveys, but even if you don't trust that: the bureau of labor has had to make huge adjustments all this year and last year. This isn't just some bad optics.

Seems perfectly plausible that the phenomenon of ghost jobs is real and it may be getting worse.

But this SF Gate piece is dumb. The article has one source for its data points and the author does nothing to investigate or challenge the quality of that data. This is not journalism. It looks like a PR piece for resume builder.

The Forbes article you linked is much more informative.

Unless I misunderstand you, you're citing a completely irrelevant factoid. Employment statistics are based on actual people working, not job ads posted. And the revisions [1] (which sometimes are upward) have nothing to do with ghost jobs, but are due to additional data coming in over time, leading to refinements of the original estimate[2].

[1] https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm [2] https://thedispatch.com/article/jobs-report-revisions-explai...

My implications are that companies are either lying and being readjusted from later audits, or government is choosing not to take data into account until later, where impact is lessened. It's not a "ghost job" in the modern meaning, but it does seem to be pretending there are a lot more jobs than in reality.

What about job postings for a position already held by an H1B visa holder?

What about job postings that are not taken down until a new hire is given the offer, agrees verbally, signs the paperwork, relocates and actually shows up on the job?