Rise of Ghost Jobs and AI Gatekeepers in the 2024 UK Job Market
In 2024, an estimated 40% of company job postings in the UK were 'ghost jobs,' advertisements for openings that do not actually exist and serve mainly to imply company growth. Despite oversight from the Advertising Standards Authority, which can mandate the removal of misleading job ads, enforcement remains weak, enabling these fake hiring sprees to continue.
The article highlights the difficult reality for job seekers, including the author who is among the 5% of Brits unemployed. She recounts six months of persistent job searching with minimal successful outcomes. The job market is further complicated by the growing use of AI-driven screening tools in recruitment processes, where HR bots filter applications based on keywords. Although the exact prevalence of these tools is unclear, past examples, such as Amazon's scrapped AI recruiting system, illustrate risks of bias.
A cited Atlantic article notes a paradox: young applicants often use AI like ChatGPT to craft their applications, while HR departments deploy AI to evaluate them, making actual hires infrequent. Increasingly, interviews and parts of hiring are conducted by bots, reducing or even eliminating human interaction throughout much of the hiring journey.
The article describes how job descriptions have evolved into so-called "franken-jobs," such as that from a hypothetical independent pet-food firm offering £27,000 but demanding a wide array of skills alongside numerous AI-filtered application steps. This phenomenon is seen as distorting the job market and contributing to a crisis where middle-class jobs become scarce and difficult to secure, especially for experienced workers trying to get interviews.
