Job Seeker Beware: Recognizing the Signs of 'Ghost Jobs'

A few years ago, the concept of “ghost jobs” came on the scene. As a Business Insider article from September 2022 describes, ghost jobs are “listings that employers are no longer actively hiring or recruiting for.” One of the biggest issues was organizations’ hesitancy to commit due to heightened uncertainty about the economy or perhaps the organization itself.

In internal communication (IC), that uncertainty seems heightened by the fact organizations often don’t know what problems they’re trying to solve with a full-time IC hire or what success looks like for the role. If you don’t know what the destination is, it’s challenging to find the path (or the person) to get you there.

Despite organizations posting and initiating recruitment for IC roles with genuine intentions, tales of candidates navigating the entire recruitment process only to find the job left vacant or eliminated altogether are becoming more prevalent. Here are some glaring red flags that hint at an organization’s reluctance to hire, signaling caution for potential candidates.

• They’re “adding a new tier” in the reporting structure
  IC’s reporting structure has always been a bit of a conundrum (more on that here). Organizations sometimes want to add a new layer of management above the Head of Internal Communication to be a Vice President of Corporate Communications or something similar. If you hear in an interview process that the organization is trying to hire a role above the one you’re applying for, expect for your hiring process to be delayed or postponed indefinitely. If the hiring manager isn’t the person who will ultimately have this role reporting into them, it’s unlikely the organization will move forward now—or possibly ever.
  
  

• The hiring manager changes during the interview process
  I’ve seen multiple cases where candidates are invited to interview for IC roles with someone described as the “hiring manager.” During those interviews, the candidates then discover, “Oh no, I’m not the hiring manager. It’s actually X or will be this new person who’s starting.” If an organization can’t clearly define who a role will actually report into, that doesn’t bode well for their communication abilities or ability to effectively hire.

•  The interview process is ambiguous
  When closing an interview, one of the best final questions to ask is, “If I were to advance in the hiring process, what would next steps look like?” Non-committal answers like, “Oh, we think we’ll want you to talk to these two other people, but we’re not really sure,” indicate that the organization hasn’t bothered to define the interview process. Expect length (or indefinite) delays as they try to sort out who needs to speak with whom.

• No one can answer “What problems are you trying to solve with this role?” or “What does success look like for this role?”
  There should always be a clearly defined approach to the problems a role is trying to solve and how success is measured. This demonstrates that the organization clearly doesn’t understand why they think they need this role, making it very easy to say, “Well, we probably don’t need it after all.”

• The role changes scope in the middle of the interview process
  For IC job seekers, it’s not uncommon to complete multiple interview rounds or even final interview rounds and hear the organization’s taking the role in a new direction. Again, they don’t know what they’re trying to accomplish with someone in the role, so they’re constantly rethinking. That leads to overthinking and then the standard decision of never hiring anyone.

The punchline here is that the 2024 job market is wild—for all job seekers, not just IC professionals. If you encounter these warning signs in your job search, it might be worth exploring alternative options.