This isn’t just a theory.

Many, maaaaany companies openly admit to posting fake job listings, ghost jobs, and your explanations of why they do this are pretty much spot on.

https://www.newsweek.com/ghost-jobs-rise-1924351

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240315-ghost-jobs-digital-job-boards

https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/ghost-job-listings-on-the-rise-how-to-spot-avoid-experts/485494

It is of course difficult to get accurate numbers because of regional / industry variance, which platform are you looking for jobs on, and oh of course those job seeker platforms are highly incentivized to not let their users know how prevalent this is…

But uh yeah, between these 3 fairly recent articles, we’ve got somewhere between 20% to 60% of companies admitting they post ghost jobs / number of actual job listings that are fake.

Yeah. Its really fucking bad, obviously for job seekers, and also in other ways (which you also correctly surmised) because it makes many metrics other companies and policy planners and econ data all fucked… normally, job openings are… you know, correlated to actual hirings?

Yeah thats all broken now, has been for years.

This phenomenon really kicked in to high gear during and after covid.

In fact, probably a whole lot of the Dems ‘the economy is fine actually, stop complaining’ rhetoric is because they were too stupid to realize this has been going on and have been relying on bullshit metrics.

Its one thing that they’re unrelatable policy nerd wonks who have 0 charisma, can’t read the room, nor actually do effective messaging… its another thing that they are also incompetent data dorks.

(I am an unsociable autist data nerd with a degree in econ and career in data analytics myself… and thus this is personal for me lol)