About a year ago, Ivan Fernandez, a writer in L.A., was looking for a job.
"It's almost like swinging at a piñata blindfolded. It's like, what am I gonna hit, if anything?" he said.
Today's jobs report shows a slight rise in the unemployment rate to 4%. And some frustrated people like Fernandez have grown tired of applying for job after job with no replies, sometimes asking whether the listings are even real.
This isn't just vexing for job seekers. It's also a problem for the Federal Reserve when it tries to figure out how much slack there is in the labor market, and whether to raise or lower interest rates.
Revelio Labs, a jobs analytics firm, looked at what they call ghost jobs by analyzing how many job postings actually result in a hire. They found that since 2018, the number of hires has dropped compared to job listings.
Lisa Simon, chief economist of Revelio Labs, called the numbers "astounding."
"We've actually seen that that trend has really exacerbated over the past five years or so," said Simon. "So one in two job postings don't result in a hire."
Another problem that haunts job seekers is ghosting — when employers start the interview process but never tell the candidate they didn't land the job. Revelio Labs finds that there's been a considerable uptick in the frequency of the word "ghosting" in online reviews left on Indeed and Glassdoor.
Understanding ghost jobs is important for policymakers in order to get an accurate picture of how the economy's doing. The Federal Reserve is keeping interest rates higher right now to control inflation, and doesn't want to send the labor market into a downward spiral. The ratio of job openings to unemployed people is one metric they look at to make sure the job market is healthy, so ghost postings could muddy the waters.
Kim Riley, an economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics says employers must be actively recruiting for their job openings number. The Bureau surveys employers repeatedly for three years and checks if there are any major discrepancies between what the businesses write in the survey and what they actually do.
Riley says that while their survey program "is familiar with 'ghost jobs', the program does not have any data related to these phenomena."
As for Fernandez, after about seven months he found a job posting for a coordinator at a youth counseling nonprofit. This one was real. He got the job, no seances required.
Related episodes:
Not too hot, not too cold: a 'Goldilocks' jobs report
The Beigie Awards: From Ghosting to Coasting
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