August 1, 2024 • 16 mins
If you’ve applied to a job and never heard back, you may have fallen prey to a ghost job — an online listing for a role that never actually existed.
Ghost jobs aren’t just leaving job seekers frustrated. They’re also muddying the waters of the labor market when it comes to assessing the strength of the economy.
On today’s Big Take podcast, Sarah Holder digs into the ghost job phenomenon with Molly Smith, an editor on Bloomberg’s US economy team.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Do you believe in ghosts because they're not just hanging
out in our creepiatics anymore. Ghosts have started to show
up in the job market.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Why does it feel like it's absolutely impossible to get
a job right now?
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Companies are posting more fake job openings. Unfortunately, just like tender,
you're getting ghosted.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
This means thousands of people, probably you, at some point,
will apply to a job online for absolutely no reason
and not here back, thinking it's your fault when it's not.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
For months now, there have been a bunch of these
posts from job seekers complaining about so called ghost jobs.
These are jobs that companies advertise and post online, luring
in unsuspecting applicants, only to have those jobs disappear without
a trace. Ghost jobs have been haunting the job market
for a while, but now they seem to be showing
(01:00):
up in the data. A recent job market report showed
the number of jobs posted by companies was far higher
than the number of people actually being hired, and in May,
an online resource for job seekers asked over sixteen hundred
hiring managers whether their companies had listed ghost jobs. Stacy
Haller is the chief career advisor at resume Builder. She
(01:22):
told us what they found.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
About thirty percent told us they currently have fake job postings.
Thirty percent is way too many. Forty percent said to
us they did it at some point during this year.
That's a lot.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
But why would companies do this? Why would they post
jobs that don't exist.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Today?
Speaker 2 (01:43):
On the show We Go ghost Job Hunting, we take
a look at the strange phenomenon, why it's happening, and
what all of the recent sightings can tell us about
what's going on in the economy. This is the big take.
I'm Sarah Holder. To get to the bottom of the
(02:04):
ghost jobs mystery, I called up Molly Smith. She's an
editor on the US Economy team at Bloomberg who started
investigating this trend last year. So, Molly, what is a
ghost job?
Speaker 3 (02:15):
So think about how you hear about this. A lot
in dating, right that people get ghosted on these dating apps,
that you maybe reach out to a person and you
never hear back from them again. It's kind of like that,
except in a job posting. There are these jobs that
people are applying to online and are not hearing back
from the recruiter. It doesn't seem like there's a real
(02:36):
intent to hire, or at least an urgent one. It's
been really frustrating a lot of job seekers. They feel
like they're being gas lit and that these postings are
out there and that they're just not really genuine from
the companies that are posting them.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
So it's not just that these jobs are ghost jobs,
they're literally ghosting applicants.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
Yes, exactly.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
When Molly first got interested in the phenomenon, she started
by looking at the data, in this case government data
the tracks how many job openings there are in the economy.
In twenty twenty two, the number peaked at twelve million
job openings, and it's still elevated, hovering around eight million
job openings. But that didn't seem to line up with
(03:15):
the vibes, which made people wonder was this number overstating
just how strong the labor market was.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
We started hearing anecdotally of people who were applying for
these jobs and just getting these wild responses. There was
somebody we saw in a Reddit thread on jobs saying
they had applied to a position for a local grocery
store online, got rejected in the same day, and then
went into the store to ask what happened, and they said, Oh,
(03:45):
we're not actually hiring right now, we're just getting some
applicants together. Why you know, this seems to be like,
from what some recruiters have told us, an explicit tactic
that recruiters will do in order to generate a pool
of applicants for when a position does actually become available.
So it's something that you can do in advance to
maybe start filtering, and then when that need is real
(04:08):
and when it is urgent, you already have a whole
lot of people to choose from.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
So seeing who's out there collecting their resumes but not
actually planning on giving a job to anyone until the
employer is ready exactly, let's give companies the benefit of
the doubt. What are some of the sort of non
sinister reasons why they might be posting ghost jobs.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
We talked to a lot of recruiters about this, and
I think we've all seen what job hostings are like online.
It's pretty easy to fire off your resume and send
off a ton of applications at want and recruiters will
say that they've just been anundated with so many that
it isn't humanly possible for them to reply to all
the applications that they've received.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Is there also a situation where some of these job
sites are leaving up jobs after they've been filled, Like,
are sites like LinkedIn and indeed really up to date
on what kinds of jobs they're advertising.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
So we talked to all of the platforms when we
were reporting this story about a year ago, and it's
interesting because we heard from Indeed that these ghost postings
are not an issue, but then they also said that
they remove tens of millions of them every month, So
it's like, okay, so which what is it. Some of
these postings can also be a bit duplicative. It seems
(05:22):
like I've seen some companies where you're hiring for a position,
but it could be filled in potentially three different regions,
and that represents three individual job postings even though it's
really just one job. So that could also be a
bit misleading. Then when you're looking at Wow, there's like
so many job openings in the economy, but maybe not
all of them are really individually different.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
But there are also some other reasons being thrown around
for why we're seeing these ghost jobs that do seem
a little bit shady or at least end up making
job applicants feel gas lit, like those recruiters who admitted
to posting jobs they weren't actually hiring for just to
build up a pool of resumes for the future. That's
just one reason to post a job. I asked Molly
(06:06):
about another scenario, what about internal hires. I've definitely seen
jobs posted that end up getting taken down really quickly
and later learn that the job has been given to
an internal candidate.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
So recruiters have told us that some postings need to
be available externally as well, in order to ensure that
the posting was fair, that they fully vetted a diverse
pool of candidates, and that it didn't exclude people because
they are external, and that you're really just getting the
widest pool available. But oftentimes a lot of job postings
(06:45):
may live on an internal company's portal for perhaps several weeks,
maybe a month, and then we'll be posted externally in
that time, though it's very possible that the job already
could have been filled and then it's only being posted
externally to give the appearance.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
I guess that it.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
Was posted fairly and given everybody a chance, even if
the decision had already been made at that point.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
So it's about optics.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
Yeah, that's one way of putting it.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
We asked Stacy Haller at resume Builder what she'd heard
from the hiring managers they surveyed in that may report,
and those managers admitted optics are a big part of it.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
So what they told us was many of them are
posting jobs, so they're on employees feel like, oh, we're
hiring more and you won't have to work so hard.
The workers are coming into the rescue, or they're telling
us they want you to believe the company is growing
and expanding when it's not.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Resume builders survey had a limited sample size and it
relied on hiring managers willing to self report their reasons
for posting ghost jobs. When it comes to official comprehensive
data on all this, there's a statistic that the Federal
Reserve uses to gauge the strength of the labor market.
It's called the Jolts Report for the Job Openings and
Labored Turnover Survey. Here's Bloomberg's Molly Smith again.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
This is a survey that comes from the Bureau of
Labor Statistics that measures how many job openings there are
in the economy in a given month, and a lot
of economists we're thinking that it was just overstating how
strong the labor market is.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
So molly as a self appointed ghost jobs buster called
up someone at the Bureau of Labor Statistics who's been
working on the jolt survey for over twenty years.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
He actually provided a lot of great insight that really
stands more to the integrity of the jolt data and
saying how vetted these firms are, that this is a
survey of twenty one thousand business establishments, it's not scraping
online job postings, and that there's also some follow up
that's done to see, well, what is the hiring like
(08:48):
at these companies. You know, they can't verify that every
posting leads to an actual hire, but if there's a
big deviation between the two, they look at that and
they will pick out the numbers that don't mesh together.
And something else the joltz data does too, is that
in order to be considered active, a posting needs to
have the intent to hire within thirty days. The real
(09:08):
issues seem to be more with these posts that are online,
that the vetting process is maybe not as strong as
what the Bureau of Labor Statistics does and well, if
these companies that the job posts are usually listed on,
whether it's LinkedIn indeed is a recruiter. They have guidelines
that are meant to filter these things out, but it
(09:29):
seems like there are posts that inevitably do fall through
the cracks.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
But ghost jobs are haunting more than just internet job boards.
If they're discouraging for job seekers, they're also frustrating to
everyone from policymakers to business owners trying to get a
sense of how well the economy is doing. We get
into all that after the break, so we know what
(09:59):
these ghost jobs mean for everyday workers trying to apply
for a job. It means frustration, disappointment, sometimes confusion. But
what does the existence of these ghost jobs mean about
the job market overall?
Speaker 3 (10:12):
Yeah, so it's tough to make an inference about the
whole economy from this, but I guess like if we're
looking at just the data that's out there, that we
can still say that demand for workers is strong, that yes,
the unemployment rate has been rising in recent months, but
it's at four point one percent that's still historically very low.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
The latest job's numbers will be released on Friday, including
the unemployment rate, and all eyes will be on it.
If that unemployment rate rises like it did last month,
it could mean the job market is starting to sour already.
We saw some worrying numbers on Thursday. Weekly jobless claims
rose more than expected to their highest level in nearly
(10:51):
a year. And according to Molly, there's another even wonkier
data point economists are paying attention to.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
There's this ratio that we look at how how many
job openings are there for every unemployed worker aka how
many postings are there for every person whom I want
a job? And right now that ratio is at one
point two. This is more in line with the job
market we saw in twenty nineteen, and that it's not
the crazy tight job market that we saw in twenty
(11:18):
twenty two, where there were two jobs for every unemployed person.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
So the job market isn't as tight as it was,
which might be a good thing when it comes to
reining in wage growth and inflation, but it's not great
for workers.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
I mean for workers, it can certainly be frustrating because
in that environment you were getting these historic wage gains.
Pay is not going up by nearly as much now
as it was then. But again, it's not like the
job market has fallen off a cliff. We've just gone
from an extremely, extremely hot one to still a really
good one.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
What has changed is who has the power in the
labor market. It's now shifted back towards employers, and that
means fewer people are quitting their jobs. We're no longer
living in the great resignation of the pandemic these days,
it's more like the Big stay. But Molly says that
isn't a reason to be totally alarmed.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
I don't want people to be scared to think that
this job market is horrible. But the way that I
describe it to my friends is that it's not a
job market that I would quit right now my job
if I had a good gig, because it certainly doesn't
look to be one that's favoring the job applicants.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
So the job market not horrible, but the slowdown does
have everybody's attention. The job market is one of the
most important parts of the US economy, and if hiring
slows down too much or unemployment rises too fast, it
could signal the US economy is heading in a bad direction.
The job market came up this week when Federal Reserve
(12:47):
cher Jerome Powell answered reporter's questions about whether or not
he would be cutting interest rates next month. The question
really is is one of are we worried about a
sharper downturn in the labor market, And the answer is,
we're watching really careful for that. It's a complicated calculus
for the Fed. A slowdown in hiring could be a
sign that the economy is slowing and they should cut
(13:07):
interest rates to help boost economic activity. But also, when
the job market was really hot, employers were offering more
and more money to lure workers to open jobs. To
offset paying workers more, companies raise the prices of the
stuff they were selling, and all that contributed to rising inflation.
Speaker 3 (13:24):
I mean, workers would love to still be getting the
kinds of pay increases that they were a couple of
years ago, and to see that they had such bargaining
power when it came to negotiating with employers for different
kinds of perks, and that's just not the same kind
of job market we're in right now. But again, I
don't think any of us thought that was a sustainable environment.
(13:45):
It was awesome while it lasted. If that was the
position you were in, but it just wasn't ever going
to last.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Are we at a turning point in the job market
right now?
Speaker 3 (13:54):
I think that's what everyone's trying to figure out. We've
kind of been talking about this with my colleagues of like,
right now, we're at what we would call a job
market that's running quote at trend. That's kind of normal,
you know, so to speak, and that's where you of
course would want to be, you know, something that is
steady state. So it's really tough right now to say
(14:14):
that this is like a bad job market again. It's
just softening very very gradually from a really really hot pace.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
Now everyone is hoping that as the job market cools off,
it doesn't get too cold. But as workers and companies
navigate this new normal, where does that leave ghost jobs?
Probably not going away anytime soon. Companies have gotten a
lot of power back in this job market, and many
hiring managers reported to resume Builder that they were happy
(14:44):
with the results of their fake job postings.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Fake job postings in ghost jobs isn't new. It's been
happening for a while, but it's kind of taken off.
So my heart goes to job seekers who now have
to understand this part of the process.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
So at least for now, it looks like it'll be
up to job seekers to try and suss out which
job postings are real. That, of course means more work
on top of all the work that already goes into
looking for a job. What advice do you have for
people who want to avoid getting misled or gas lit
by a ghost job.
Speaker 3 (15:20):
I think one way maybe to do it is to
see if the job posting exists on a company's website
as well as on a platform, trace it back to
the original source, like is it actually there? And if
you do have some doubts, you know, maybe if there
is a contact to get to the recruiter directly. I
think everybody just really wants to know that there's a
(15:41):
human on the other side. That there's so much technology
and generative AI and so much of what we do now,
maybe without us even realizing it, that there still is
comfort to know that when you call somebody that there
is going to be a person on the other end.
Same with dating, same with applying to jobs.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
This episode was produced by Julia Press. It was fact
checked by Adrian Atapia and edited by Stacy Vennicksmith and
Aaron Edwards. It was mixed by Blake Naples. Our senior
producers are Kim Gettlelson and Naomi Shaven. Our senior editor
is Elizabeth Ponso. Nicole beemsterbor is our executive producer. Sage
(16:23):
Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks so much for listening.
Please follow and review The Big Take wherever you get
your podcasts. It helps new listeners find the show. We'll
be back tomorrow
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Do you believe in ghosts because they're not just hanging
out in our creepiatics anymore. Ghosts have started to show
up in the job market.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Why does it feel like it's absolutely impossible to get
a job right now?
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Companies are posting more fake job openings. Unfortunately, just like tender,
you're getting ghosted.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
This means thousands of people, probably you, at some point,
will apply to a job online for absolutely no reason
and not here back, thinking it's your fault when it's not.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
For months now, there have been a bunch of these
posts from job seekers complaining about so called ghost jobs.
These are jobs that companies advertise and post online, luring
in unsuspecting applicants, only to have those jobs disappear without
a trace. Ghost jobs have been haunting the job market
for a while, but now they seem to be showing
(01:00):
up in the data. A recent job market report showed
the number of jobs posted by companies was far higher
than the number of people actually being hired, and in May,
an online resource for job seekers asked over sixteen hundred
hiring managers whether their companies had listed ghost jobs. Stacy
Haller is the chief career advisor at resume Builder. She
(01:22):
told us what they found.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
About thirty percent told us they currently have fake job postings.
Thirty percent is way too many. Forty percent said to
us they did it at some point during this year.
That's a lot.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
But why would companies do this? Why would they post
jobs that don't exist.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Today?
Speaker 2 (01:43):
On the show We Go ghost Job Hunting, we take
a look at the strange phenomenon, why it's happening, and
what all of the recent sightings can tell us about
what's going on in the economy. This is the big take.
I'm Sarah Holder. To get to the bottom of the
(02:04):
ghost jobs mystery, I called up Molly Smith. She's an
editor on the US Economy team at Bloomberg who started
investigating this trend last year. So, Molly, what is a
ghost job?
Speaker 3 (02:15):
So think about how you hear about this. A lot
in dating, right that people get ghosted on these dating apps,
that you maybe reach out to a person and you
never hear back from them again. It's kind of like that,
except in a job posting. There are these jobs that
people are applying to online and are not hearing back
from the recruiter. It doesn't seem like there's a real
(02:36):
intent to hire, or at least an urgent one. It's
been really frustrating a lot of job seekers. They feel
like they're being gas lit and that these postings are
out there and that they're just not really genuine from
the companies that are posting them.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
So it's not just that these jobs are ghost jobs,
they're literally ghosting applicants.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
Yes, exactly.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
When Molly first got interested in the phenomenon, she started
by looking at the data, in this case government data
the tracks how many job openings there are in the economy.
In twenty twenty two, the number peaked at twelve million
job openings, and it's still elevated, hovering around eight million
job openings. But that didn't seem to line up with
(03:15):
the vibes, which made people wonder was this number overstating
just how strong the labor market was.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
We started hearing anecdotally of people who were applying for
these jobs and just getting these wild responses. There was
somebody we saw in a Reddit thread on jobs saying
they had applied to a position for a local grocery
store online, got rejected in the same day, and then
went into the store to ask what happened, and they said, Oh,
(03:45):
we're not actually hiring right now, we're just getting some
applicants together. Why you know, this seems to be like,
from what some recruiters have told us, an explicit tactic
that recruiters will do in order to generate a pool
of applicants for when a position does actually become available.
So it's something that you can do in advance to
maybe start filtering, and then when that need is real
(04:08):
and when it is urgent, you already have a whole
lot of people to choose from.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
So seeing who's out there collecting their resumes but not
actually planning on giving a job to anyone until the
employer is ready exactly, let's give companies the benefit of
the doubt. What are some of the sort of non
sinister reasons why they might be posting ghost jobs.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
We talked to a lot of recruiters about this, and
I think we've all seen what job hostings are like online.
It's pretty easy to fire off your resume and send
off a ton of applications at want and recruiters will
say that they've just been anundated with so many that
it isn't humanly possible for them to reply to all
the applications that they've received.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Is there also a situation where some of these job
sites are leaving up jobs after they've been filled, Like,
are sites like LinkedIn and indeed really up to date
on what kinds of jobs they're advertising.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
So we talked to all of the platforms when we
were reporting this story about a year ago, and it's
interesting because we heard from Indeed that these ghost postings
are not an issue, but then they also said that
they remove tens of millions of them every month, So
it's like, okay, so which what is it. Some of
these postings can also be a bit duplicative. It seems
(05:22):
like I've seen some companies where you're hiring for a position,
but it could be filled in potentially three different regions,
and that represents three individual job postings even though it's
really just one job. So that could also be a
bit misleading. Then when you're looking at Wow, there's like
so many job openings in the economy, but maybe not
all of them are really individually different.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
But there are also some other reasons being thrown around
for why we're seeing these ghost jobs that do seem
a little bit shady or at least end up making
job applicants feel gas lit, like those recruiters who admitted
to posting jobs they weren't actually hiring for just to
build up a pool of resumes for the future. That's
just one reason to post a job. I asked Molly
(06:06):
about another scenario, what about internal hires. I've definitely seen
jobs posted that end up getting taken down really quickly
and later learn that the job has been given to
an internal candidate.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
So recruiters have told us that some postings need to
be available externally as well, in order to ensure that
the posting was fair, that they fully vetted a diverse
pool of candidates, and that it didn't exclude people because
they are external, and that you're really just getting the
widest pool available. But oftentimes a lot of job postings
(06:45):
may live on an internal company's portal for perhaps several weeks,
maybe a month, and then we'll be posted externally in
that time, though it's very possible that the job already
could have been filled and then it's only being posted
externally to give the appearance.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
I guess that it.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
Was posted fairly and given everybody a chance, even if
the decision had already been made at that point.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
So it's about optics.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
Yeah, that's one way of putting it.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
We asked Stacy Haller at resume Builder what she'd heard
from the hiring managers they surveyed in that may report,
and those managers admitted optics are a big part of it.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
So what they told us was many of them are
posting jobs, so they're on employees feel like, oh, we're
hiring more and you won't have to work so hard.
The workers are coming into the rescue, or they're telling
us they want you to believe the company is growing
and expanding when it's not.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Resume builders survey had a limited sample size and it
relied on hiring managers willing to self report their reasons
for posting ghost jobs. When it comes to official comprehensive
data on all this, there's a statistic that the Federal
Reserve uses to gauge the strength of the labor market.
It's called the Jolts Report for the Job Openings and
Labored Turnover Survey. Here's Bloomberg's Molly Smith again.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
This is a survey that comes from the Bureau of
Labor Statistics that measures how many job openings there are
in the economy in a given month, and a lot
of economists we're thinking that it was just overstating how
strong the labor market is.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
So molly as a self appointed ghost jobs buster called
up someone at the Bureau of Labor Statistics who's been
working on the jolt survey for over twenty years.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
He actually provided a lot of great insight that really
stands more to the integrity of the jolt data and
saying how vetted these firms are, that this is a
survey of twenty one thousand business establishments, it's not scraping
online job postings, and that there's also some follow up
that's done to see, well, what is the hiring like
(08:48):
at these companies. You know, they can't verify that every
posting leads to an actual hire, but if there's a
big deviation between the two, they look at that and
they will pick out the numbers that don't mesh together.
And something else the joltz data does too, is that
in order to be considered active, a posting needs to
have the intent to hire within thirty days. The real
(09:08):
issues seem to be more with these posts that are online,
that the vetting process is maybe not as strong as
what the Bureau of Labor Statistics does and well, if
these companies that the job posts are usually listed on,
whether it's LinkedIn indeed is a recruiter. They have guidelines
that are meant to filter these things out, but it
(09:29):
seems like there are posts that inevitably do fall through
the cracks.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
But ghost jobs are haunting more than just internet job boards.
If they're discouraging for job seekers, they're also frustrating to
everyone from policymakers to business owners trying to get a
sense of how well the economy is doing. We get
into all that after the break, so we know what
(09:59):
these ghost jobs mean for everyday workers trying to apply
for a job. It means frustration, disappointment, sometimes confusion. But
what does the existence of these ghost jobs mean about
the job market overall?
Speaker 3 (10:12):
Yeah, so it's tough to make an inference about the
whole economy from this, but I guess like if we're
looking at just the data that's out there, that we
can still say that demand for workers is strong, that yes,
the unemployment rate has been rising in recent months, but
it's at four point one percent that's still historically very low.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
The latest job's numbers will be released on Friday, including
the unemployment rate, and all eyes will be on it.
If that unemployment rate rises like it did last month,
it could mean the job market is starting to sour already.
We saw some worrying numbers on Thursday. Weekly jobless claims
rose more than expected to their highest level in nearly
(10:51):
a year. And according to Molly, there's another even wonkier
data point economists are paying attention to.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
There's this ratio that we look at how how many
job openings are there for every unemployed worker aka how
many postings are there for every person whom I want
a job? And right now that ratio is at one
point two. This is more in line with the job
market we saw in twenty nineteen, and that it's not
the crazy tight job market that we saw in twenty
(11:18):
twenty two, where there were two jobs for every unemployed person.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
So the job market isn't as tight as it was,
which might be a good thing when it comes to
reining in wage growth and inflation, but it's not great
for workers.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
I mean for workers, it can certainly be frustrating because
in that environment you were getting these historic wage gains.
Pay is not going up by nearly as much now
as it was then. But again, it's not like the
job market has fallen off a cliff. We've just gone
from an extremely, extremely hot one to still a really
good one.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
What has changed is who has the power in the
labor market. It's now shifted back towards employers, and that
means fewer people are quitting their jobs. We're no longer
living in the great resignation of the pandemic these days,
it's more like the Big stay. But Molly says that
isn't a reason to be totally alarmed.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
I don't want people to be scared to think that
this job market is horrible. But the way that I
describe it to my friends is that it's not a
job market that I would quit right now my job
if I had a good gig, because it certainly doesn't
look to be one that's favoring the job applicants.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
So the job market not horrible, but the slowdown does
have everybody's attention. The job market is one of the
most important parts of the US economy, and if hiring
slows down too much or unemployment rises too fast, it
could signal the US economy is heading in a bad direction.
The job market came up this week when Federal Reserve
(12:47):
cher Jerome Powell answered reporter's questions about whether or not
he would be cutting interest rates next month. The question
really is is one of are we worried about a
sharper downturn in the labor market, And the answer is,
we're watching really careful for that. It's a complicated calculus
for the Fed. A slowdown in hiring could be a
sign that the economy is slowing and they should cut
(13:07):
interest rates to help boost economic activity. But also, when
the job market was really hot, employers were offering more
and more money to lure workers to open jobs. To
offset paying workers more, companies raise the prices of the
stuff they were selling, and all that contributed to rising inflation.
Speaker 3 (13:24):
I mean, workers would love to still be getting the
kinds of pay increases that they were a couple of
years ago, and to see that they had such bargaining
power when it came to negotiating with employers for different
kinds of perks, and that's just not the same kind
of job market we're in right now. But again, I
don't think any of us thought that was a sustainable environment.
(13:45):
It was awesome while it lasted. If that was the
position you were in, but it just wasn't ever going
to last.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Are we at a turning point in the job market
right now?
Speaker 3 (13:54):
I think that's what everyone's trying to figure out. We've
kind of been talking about this with my colleagues of like,
right now, we're at what we would call a job
market that's running quote at trend. That's kind of normal,
you know, so to speak, and that's where you of
course would want to be, you know, something that is
steady state. So it's really tough right now to say
(14:14):
that this is like a bad job market again. It's
just softening very very gradually from a really really hot pace.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
Now everyone is hoping that as the job market cools off,
it doesn't get too cold. But as workers and companies
navigate this new normal, where does that leave ghost jobs?
Probably not going away anytime soon. Companies have gotten a
lot of power back in this job market, and many
hiring managers reported to resume Builder that they were happy
(14:44):
with the results of their fake job postings.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Fake job postings in ghost jobs isn't new. It's been
happening for a while, but it's kind of taken off.
So my heart goes to job seekers who now have
to understand this part of the process.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
So at least for now, it looks like it'll be
up to job seekers to try and suss out which
job postings are real. That, of course means more work
on top of all the work that already goes into
looking for a job. What advice do you have for
people who want to avoid getting misled or gas lit
by a ghost job.
Speaker 3 (15:20):
I think one way maybe to do it is to
see if the job posting exists on a company's website
as well as on a platform, trace it back to
the original source, like is it actually there? And if
you do have some doubts, you know, maybe if there
is a contact to get to the recruiter directly. I
think everybody just really wants to know that there's a
(15:41):
human on the other side. That there's so much technology
and generative AI and so much of what we do now,
maybe without us even realizing it, that there still is
comfort to know that when you call somebody that there
is going to be a person on the other end.
Same with dating, same with applying to jobs.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
This episode was produced by Julia Press. It was fact
checked by Adrian Atapia and edited by Stacy Vennicksmith and
Aaron Edwards. It was mixed by Blake Naples. Our senior
producers are Kim Gettlelson and Naomi Shaven. Our senior editor
is Elizabeth Ponso. Nicole beemsterbor is our executive producer. Sage
(16:23):
Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks so much for listening.
Please follow and review The Big Take wherever you get
your podcasts. It helps new listeners find the show. We'll
be back tomorrow
Hosts And Creators
Sarah Holder
Saleha Mohsin
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