That statistic that 1 in 5 job listings might be a “ghost job” comes from a company developing application tracking systems (Greenhouse) and as far as I can tell they included every listing on their website that wasn’t eventually marked as hired in their system. So a company that wanted to hire multiple people under the same application, choosing to leave it open, would be classified as a ghost job.
Most tech companies I worked for would have had our common hiring listings like “Senior Software Engineer” flagged as ghost jobs under this system. I think they wanted to use this report to get their name out, and it’s working because journalists like the WSJ and even politicians are now parading their report around.
The Greenhouse website looks like exactly the kind of ATS you don’t want. The top feature I see on their website is “Voice AI” which will perform an AI voice interview with the candidate for you.
I don’t want anything to do with that company and I don’t trust their numbers either.
Most tech companies I worked for would have had our common hiring listings like “Senior Software Engineer” flagged as ghost jobs under this system. I think they wanted to use this report to get their name out, and it’s working because journalists like the WSJ and even politicians are now parading their report around.
The Greenhouse website looks like exactly the kind of ATS you don’t want. The top feature I see on their website is “Voice AI” which will perform an AI voice interview with the candidate for you.
I don’t want anything to do with that company and I don’t trust their numbers either.