Hung Lee, Editor at Recruiting Brainfood, joins TheStreet to discuss why we're seeing a rise in "ghost jobs."
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00:00All right, so tell me, we're seeing a rise in ghost jobs.
00:04So that's where legitimate companies are posting fake job listings.
00:08What's going on here and what's the point?
00:12You know what, I would actually challenge the premise a little bit.
00:18I think there's a lot of ghosting going on in the sense that candidates are sending applications
00:24to job adverts and then not getting a response.
00:27So that can certainly feel like the job may be fake.
00:33But it's less likely that the job is actually fake.
00:36It's more likely that there is just a significant inefficiency with regards to how companies
00:42and recruiters handle job applications, which is, I think, a better explanation for the
00:48phenomenon of not getting a response to a job application.
00:51I understand that you don't necessarily buy into the idea of there being a ghost job scam.
00:58But just humor me for a minute.
01:00If there is such a thing that is happening where companies are posting jobs that they
01:05don't intend to fill, how can we identify if you're right or I'm right?
01:15It's going to be difficult to prove because we're talking about the intent of the organization.
01:21The reason why I'm confident that the ghost job phenomenon is overrated, in the sense
01:27that the job is never designed to be filled, is simply the effort that it takes for an
01:34organization to not only post a job, but then to have to handle the applicant flow, makes
01:39it sort of not worthwhile.
01:41There isn't any real value in an organization doing it.
01:47It's much more likely as a result of inefficiencies internally in the business.
01:54It's certainly to do with job advert duplication.
01:58That's another phenomenon that is a big contributor to this.
02:03And also there's a lot of jobs out there that kind of need to be published because of compliance
02:10reasons also, particularly in the public sector.
02:13So those jobs are created, they're posted, they're real jobs, there's a full intent to
02:19hire, but it may not be necessary to actually post a job from a recruitment point of view,
02:26but you do it for a compliance reason.
02:29So the job isn't fake, it's just an unnecessary advert.