Dire workplace trend sweeps across Australia

The heartbreak of not getting a job after putting a lot of time and effort into the application has been made worse by the revelation that the position may not even have existed in the first place. 

A dire trend of so-called ‘ghost job’ ads has emerged across Australia, crushing the aspirations of applicants who believed they had the attributes and a good chance of getting the position. 

Ghost jobs are advertised roles that the employer has no intention of filling, or they have already been filled.

Duped Aussies have flocked to social media to vent their anger about their time being wasted applying for non-existent roles. 

One job hunter submitted 33 applications in two months, which resulted in just two interviews. 

‘I don’t want to hear anyone say ‘nobody wants to work’ these companies won’t hire,’ they wrote on X.  

A telltale sign that an advertised role may be a ghost job is if the ad for it has run for more than 30 days, workplace commentator Ben Hamer told ABC Radio National. 

Employers ‘can’t afford to go months and months without someone sitting in a job, according to Mr Hamer. 

But they can afford to play with people’s emotions by advertising jobs that aren’t available.

‘What a lot of companies do, particularly recruiters, is put trade jobs on (recruitment sites) because the more jobs they have on it, if they’ve got the budget, the smaller companies can’t compete,’ Graham Wynn of Superior People Recruitment told Yahoo.

It’s a ploy companies use so that their jobs always appear first and then push the small ones further down the page, helping them to get the best candidates for their genuine jobs.

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 just post ‘fake’ ones to fill the gaps.

Some recruiters also use fake job ads as a marketing tool to make themselves look like experts in a particular area, and bigger than they actually are.

This might then lead to people looking to do business in that area to call them rather than a company they see as smaller or with less specialist knowledge.  

Some ghost jobs are there for legal reasons, Mr Wynn claimed.

He used an example of a business that had to advertise a job online because they had to show they were open to hiring an external candidate. 

But the reality was the company had already filled the position internally.

Sometimes job ads stay online even after the role has been filled in case the person hired changes their mind, or because the company wants to see what kind of candidates are available for future vacancies.

Dr Hamer said another clue a job might not really exist is if the ad’s wording is not specific.  

‘If it seems like (the ad) is a little bit vague, then it’s potentially a ghost job. If it’s quite specific, it gives you the impression that there’s a genuine role that they’re trying to fill.

‘Some of those may be ones where the recruitment process was just delayed. But a fair chunk of those are (positions) that were never intended to be filled in the first place.’

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