Brittany Luce

When workers have a lot of outside options, then quits go up.

But when bosses have more options, then firings go up.

And during the grant resignation, workers had lots of options if they wanted to leave their job and go find one that they found more fulfilling, that paid them more, that offered better benefits, that let them work remotely or move across the country or to a different country or something like that.

And now that's going away because the labor market is cooling down.

So we are seeing this shift in power back to employers from workers.

So this phenomenon of people sending out like hundreds of applications and hearing nothing back, is that new?

And if it is, why is that happening?

Yeah, they call this ghost jobs, and that can take a bunch of different forms, but it's definitely a thing.

We've documented it on the indicator.

And just to give you one stat, for that indicator episode, we talked to this jobs analytics company, and this company analyzed online job postings, and they said that in 2018...

one out of every five job listings would not result in a hire, right?

So that means like four job listings would result in a hire, one would not.

And then a few years ago, one out of two would not result in a hire.

So it's gotten much worse.

This is anything from...

Someone who sends out an application and never hears back to a listing just being straight out fake, you know, like a LinkedIn post or something on an online job board being fake.

And there's a lot of different reasons for this.

One that I thought was interesting, and this could be an edge case.

The way these online job boards are set up, often employers pay a certain amount of money and then they get to put up a certain number of postings.

So some employers, in order to maximize their money, they're like, well, we'll just use our maximum number of postings, even if maybe they're not really going to hire for all of those jobs just because they don't want to waste their money because they've already been charged for those postings.