This headline was carefully written to trigger confirmation bias, but the phrase “or never filled” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Most mid-sized companies where I’ve been a hiring manager haven’t had a 1:1 relationship between job postings and hires. Some times we’d post 1 job posting but hire 2-3 people out of it. Other times we’d post 2 or 3 job listings at different levels for 1 headcount because we were open to candidates of wide skill range but a single wide-range posting tends to turn off more experienced candidates. We’ve had situations where an internal candidate expresses interest in a public job posting, so we take it down without filling it and replace it with a different posting for their backfill.
So looking back, several of my job postings would be considered “fake or never filled” despite the fact that we were honestly hiring and filling roles.
This article and the WSJ article it sources from feel like journalists picking up on a social media trend and working backward to provide fodder for it. There is no 1:1 relationship between a job posting and a hire at many companies, so using job posting data to draw conclusions like this isn’t good logic. It probably feels like vindication to people who are tired of applying to jobs, though.
Most mid-sized companies where I’ve been a hiring manager haven’t had a 1:1 relationship between job postings and hires. Some times we’d post 1 job posting but hire 2-3 people out of it. Other times we’d post 2 or 3 job listings at different levels for 1 headcount because we were open to candidates of wide skill range but a single wide-range posting tends to turn off more experienced candidates. We’ve had situations where an internal candidate expresses interest in a public job posting, so we take it down without filling it and replace it with a different posting for their backfill.
So looking back, several of my job postings would be considered “fake or never filled” despite the fact that we were honestly hiring and filling roles.
This article and the WSJ article it sources from feel like journalists picking up on a social media trend and working backward to provide fodder for it. There is no 1:1 relationship between a job posting and a hire at many companies, so using job posting data to draw conclusions like this isn’t good logic. It probably feels like vindication to people who are tired of applying to jobs, though.