How ghost jobs are injecting digital fakery into Australian job numbers

“But at the same time I don’t think, when you look at the type of recent evolution of the labor market data, you can completely exclude them as a partial factor.”

Covid-19 has stimulated an increase in the percentage of vacant works, said Borland, which has decreased “rather slowly” since then, with the percentage of vacant jobs considerably above where it was before Covid-19.

When the pandemic hit in March 2020, the percentage of vacant jobs was about 1.5 percent, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistic Data. This figure increased to 3 % in the middle of 2022, since the blocks and interruptions of the offer increased the demand for workers.

However, since the blocks have passed, the percentage of vacant jobs remained higher than 2.1 percent, according to ABS data.

In February, the index of vacant places in Jobs and Skills Australia (JSA) showed 31 % more advertising in the labor market compared to the monthly average for 2019. It was further relieved at about 20 % in March.

In a statement, JSA explained the increase in job advertisements indicating a “tightest overall work market” with a strong growth in work and an unemployment rate well below the levels of 2019.

And RBA has mentioned a strong growth of work as one of the reasons to maintain the cash rate at 4.35 percent from the end of 2023 to February. In a bulletin released in April last year, the RBA he said that “Every single indicator tends to provide a partial vision of the labor market and the level of each indicator consistent with full employment can change over time as the structure of the economy evolves.”

This lack of clarity suggests that the common online aquifer on social media could now insinuate itself into the labor market.

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Ben Hamer, the contract professor of Edith Cowan University, said that identifying “a verified ghost work announcement” is difficult “because by its very nature, the corporate advertising to which he wants to give the impression for which he is actively recruited”.

It indicates the number of conversations on social media of people who compare the notes and even the drafting of ghost advertisers lists.

The impact on the data remains unclear. The Borland of Melbourne University asks why Ghost Jobs was not a significant problem in Australia before the pandemic if they were simply the result of false work lists.

However, if the concrete data on the demand for work are increasingly diluted with publications for non -existent work, false information may have an effect.

In the United States last year, after an elector brought to his attention the question of Ghost Jobs, deputy Keith Self raised the question of the economic impact with the United States Department of Labor. “How do ghost job offers affect the accuracy of unemployment data and other labor market indicators?” he asked.

While the total number of ghost job advertisements is difficult to measure, the definition of a ghost job is not even clear.

Hunter NG, of City University in New York, in a document on the trend in the United States, places three reasons for the publication of ads for non -existent works: Departments of human resources trying to circumvent long hiring times for specialized works; Companies trying to understand the state of the candidate market and the “productivity theater” – essentially, a way for the human resources departments to seem efficient.

CV construction service Myperfectresude, Who has 753 recruiters on the trend through its site, advances a more colorful motivation behind the reason why they advertise non -existent jobs.

A common reason to publish Ghost Job advertising was “maintaining a presence on the work bulletin board even when we are not hiring,” recruiters said.

Other reasons declared by the recruiters had to build a pool of talents for the future, to obtain insights on the labor market and try to learn how difficult it would be to replace a certain employee, who can be read as a sort of psychological war against that employee.

Whether it’s making a company “practicable during a freezing of hires”, to increase its online profile or improve its reputation, a ghost work announcement is a legitimate advertisement: but aimed at the company’s competitors, the market, the media or the company’s public. The only constituent he does not satisfy is potential employees.

Another reason often presented to justify these ads is definitely Pavlovian and brazen. False job advertisements are there to “evaluate the effectiveness” of “job descriptions”. Productivity theater, really.

With online work sites that offer free publications, the dynamics of the job search are changing. Mariappanadar of ACU states that Ghost Jobs has put “companies in a commander position” in relation to hiring.

From a corporate point of view, employers see some works in the service sector as very dynamic, says Mariappanadar, therefore they are moving towards work descriptions based on the skills they can change.

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That’s why employers are “trying to keep [the ad] Open “, according to Mariappanadar, in fact to launch a wider network and always have the hand of the whisk during the intake process.

Anu’s Professor Alison Both said that companies risk building a pool of obsolete candidates by resuming by keeping the same announcement for long periods of time. So if companies publish announcements for jobs that do not exist, a “much more plausible” reason would be the desire for the company to “seem dynamic” on the market.

And as Borland, Both warns that without knowing the full extension of the phenomenon in our labor market, it is very difficult to know how great a distortion is that these false job advertisements are offering to our economy.