An AI bot-war destroyed the online job market
The online job market faces challenges with "ghost jobs," outdated listings, and scams, frustrating job seekers. Automation complicates the search, creating a disparity between perceived and actual employment opportunities.
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The online job market is facing significant challenges despite reports of low unemployment rates. Many job listings are "ghost jobs," which are positions that are either filled, never existed, or were never intended to be filled. A survey revealed that hiring managers often keep these listings active to create an illusion of company growth or to motivate current employees. Automation tools are increasingly used to manage these listings, leading to a proliferation of outdated or fake job postings. Companies like Indeed and LinkedIn utilize scraping technology to aggregate job listings from various sources, which can result in applicants applying for positions that are no longer available. Additionally, scammers exploit this environment by creating fake job postings to collect personal information from job seekers. The Federal Trade Commission reported a significant increase in job-related scams, costing victims nearly half a billion dollars in 2023. As a result, many job seekers are frustrated, feeling that their efforts are wasted on applications that lead nowhere. The disparity between the perceived strength of the job market and the reality faced by applicants highlights a troubling trend where automation and AI are complicating the job search process, making it more difficult for individuals to find legitimate employment opportunities.
14 commentsCombined, these help explain why people complain of applying for 60 jobs and only hearing back from two of them - most of the listings aren't actually valid leads.
From the article:
> Half the managers in question said that one emphatically ambiguous reason they would keep such job listings open indefinitely was because “The company was always open to new people.” That was actually one of the better answers on a list of very bad ones. A tie, at 43%, went to the next most-common responses, “To give the impression that the company is growing” and “To keep current employees motivated.” Perhaps the most infuriating replies came in at 39% and 33%, respectively: “The job was filled” (but the post was left online anyway to keep gathering résumés), and “No reason in particular.”
> That’s right, all you go-getters out there: When you scream your 87th cover letter into the ghost-job void, there’s a one in three chance that your time was wasted for “no reason in particular.”
I think AI is massively negative on the environment via increased energy consumption to train large LLMs, on creative endeavors via the auto-generated art, etc. on labor via automation of jobs through AI agents, or the degradation of the job market, on public communication via the proliferation of fake videos/news, on personal relationships via AI significant others, on child development through easier cheating, etc, etc.
I get that there's a certain inevitability about technology. I also feel - and this could be a terrible analogy - that might have been what it was like to develop nuclear weapons. Better to develop and harness the technology for yourself if your competition is doing so too. That's the world and the market that we've constructed and it's rational to take advantage where you can.
I certainly don't pretend to stand on any moral high ground about what I would do if given the opportunity to cash out from AI skills if I had them.
But it all makes me very sad. I think I'll go read a book.
It’s not, it really is that bad, and more than a dozen of them since lost their job and messaged me saying that the blogpost is much more real than they could’ve ever imagined.
Yes they can! It's stunning to see this level of media illiteracy from a reporter. In a country of 300 million people, there's all kinds of misleading or outright fictitious trends that you'll never run out of examples for. And then the article goes on to cite a "time-to-hire" statistic from a private report written by some guy and his self-named consulting company.
I'm a lot less confident this trend is even real than I was when I started reading.
It seems like one should spend maybe 20% of their work time just maintaining professional connections to make sure they can find a job when they inevitably need one.
s/An AI bot-war/Greed, selfishness, and laziness/g> In other words, were they using early forms of what could now be considered management AI to automatically re-submit ghost listings
Surely you don't need an AI to automate a job resubmission, but somehow the author needed to grab attention by mentioning AI. No one asked the hiring managers if they were doing this. Workable is mentioned, but then this gem arises:
> what’s called “job post scraping,”
Yeah, AI writing job postings allright.
We finally get to the AI part:
> Armed with AI-driven interactive voice emulators, domain name spoofing, Python-powered web crawlers, the ability to post a fake job while posing as a real company, and some basic 3rd-grade distraction skills, scammers are winning in ways that would’ve seemed like science fiction just a few years ago.
Ok fine, but automated voice chatbots are not seamless yet.
The article is connecting random things and claiming it's AI
Higher interest rates makes money more scarse, section 174 makes hiring programmers too expensive, high inflation makes everyone poorer… but sure, it must be the evil AI!
*Which are real places that have been already let months ago but whose status was never updated to keep them in search results.
if both sides are going to blindly spam with llm, why not only send one application and let the likes of workday match the profile with internal personnel requirements?
being without a job during my search and getting little to no replies to hundreds of applications, often tens in the same company, drained the life out of me and i wish this to nobody.
it seems like this will have a similar fate as filing for taxes in the states. the job platforms benefit from the on-paper engagement this situation produces.