Simon Willison’s Weblog

Everlasting jobstoppers: How an AI bot-war destroyed the online job market (via) This story by Joe Tauke highlights several unpleasant trends from the online job directory space at the moment.

The first is "ghost jobs" - job listings that company put out which don't actually correspond to an open roll. A survey found that this is done for a few reasons: to keep harvesting resumes for future reference, to imply that the company is successful, and then:

Perhaps the most infuriating replies came in at 39% and 33%, respectively: “The job was filled” (but the post was left online anyway to keep gathering résumés), and “No reason in particular.”

That’s right, all you go-getters out there: When you scream your 87th cover letter into the ghost-job void, there’s a one in three chance that your time was wasted for “no reason in particular.”

Another trend is "job post scraping". Plenty of job listings sites are supported by advertising, so the more content they can gather the better. This has lead to an explosion of web scraping, resulting in vast tracts of listings that were copied from other sites and likely to be out-of-date or no longer correspond to open positions.

Most worrying of all: scams.

With so much automation available, it’s become easier than ever for identity thieves to flood the employment market with their own versions of ghost jobs — not to make a real company seem like it’s growing or to make real employees feel like they’re under constant threat of being replaced, but to get practically all the personal information a victim could ever provide.

I'm not 100% convinced by the "AI bot-war" component of this headline though. The article later notes that the "ghost jobs" report it quotes was written before ChatGPT's launch in November 2022. The story ends with a flurry of examples of new AI-driven tools for both applicants and recruiters, and I've certainly heard anecdotes of LinkedIn spam that clearly has a flavour of ChatGPT to it, but I'm not convinced that the AI component is (yet) as frustration-inducing as the other patterns described above.