While the weekly jobless claim numbers that come out every Thursday are notoriously volatile, they can reveal trends over time — especially when it comes to people who have been unemployed for a while.
Last week’s numbers revealed more than 1.8 million people in that category, the most since November of 2021. Folks who’ve been on the job market say one of many frustrations they confront is applying for so-called “ghost jobs.”
When you apply for unemployment insurance for the first time, you’re counted in the initial claims for unemployment. But if you keep applying in the weeks after, you end up in the “insured unemployment” data set commonly referred to as “continuing claims” for unemployment. And it’s not a great place to be.
“‘A barren desert wasteland’ is the best way I can describe it,” said Ryan Coleman, an IT worker in Minneapolis who’s been out of work for 11 months.
He estimates he’s put in more than 1,000 applications at this point and has had only had five interviews and no real prospects. He’s pretty sure a lot of those jobs he applied for weren’t even real.
Like one he saw last week. “There is a local manufacturer here in the Twin Cities that was looking for an IT technician,” he said. “They have posted this job every month for the last three months, at least.”
He applied got rejected and then “seven hours later, I’m on one of the job boards, and the job has posted brand new, the exact same job, word for word.”
Coleman’s frustrations are shared by a lot of job seekers these days, according to Lisa Simon, chief economist at Revelio Labs, a workforce data company that’s been tracking “ghost jobs.”
“Their prevalence has just grown dramatically over the past five years,” she said.
These are positions that stay up for months at a time without a hire as companies seek to stockpile resumes pan for the occasional gold nugget or send a message to existing employees.
“So while in 2020, for every say 10 job postings, there would be eight hires being made eventually, now, the number is down to four in 10 jobs result in a hire, which is a super dramatic drop,” Simon said.
There are ways job seekers can spot a potentially fake posting, per Stacie Haller, chief career adviser for ResumeBuilder.com.
“The first thing I would do is look at the date of the job posting,” she said.
If the job’s been up for months, Haller said that may be a red flag. “And if you see a job posting on a job board, the very best thing to do is to go to the company’s website and see if that job is also listed on their career page.”
And, Haller added, you can always reach out directly to HR at the prospect company to just ask if that dream job is actually real.
