Gen Z has located its common enemy. She works in HR and entered the public imagination earlier this year in the form of a viral meme. A speech bubble emerges from the mouth of a cartoon woman. She is traced, for some reason, over a photograph of Oscar-winning actress Anne Hathaway. “We should have an answer for you by the end of next week!”
“I LOVE APPLICANTS,” her T-shirt reads. “BUT I WOULD NEVER, EVER HIRE ONE.”
The applicants in question are very young but very jaded. Their parents and teachers told them a degree would take them places; they accepted three years and nearly £30,000 in tuition loans so they could enter the labour market. Instead they are on a steady train to Rejection Central. Half the time the train doesn’t even turn up; the invisible woman in HR asks for a tailored CV and cover letter before leaving it all to rot in an obscure corner of her inbox.
The press won’t leave this beleaguered group alone. Last month, the Times featured a cast of Oxbridge students who had been forced back into their family homes; the BBC had an MSc Management graduate who had applied to 2,000 roles and been rejected from Aldi. “Inside the hellish jobs market where applicants face 140-1 odds,” announced the Telegraph, as if it were a gameshow.
There’s no unifying explanation here: the plight of this new graduate class represents whatever our national pundits want it to. Some blame the rapid takeover of AI chatbots, which aren’t great managers but can easily take over the kind of menial administrative work often assigned in the first few years of an office job. Others point to the Labour government, whose National Insurance rise this spring forced many employers to cut back on hiring. Newspaper comment sections fill up with people decrying the UK university system, which now seems to operate totally out of step with the job market.
“It feels that my skillset just isn’t needed in the world that I inhabit,” confirmed Matthew, a recent Economics and International Relations graduate. “Which is quite confusing, having been told for much of my life that a degree would secure me a job.” One company supplying private tutors asked him to sit a two-hour exam. He completed it and received no response. An AI training firm sent him “trial work” as part of his application. After finishing the task, he never heard back. “I am convinced this was just a scheme to get unpaid labour to train AI models,” he said. He faces the same issue even when looking for work with no relation to his degree course. “Restaurant work, warehouse work, cleaning,” he said. “I didn’t get any responses from any of them.” Of the roles he encounters online, he reckons “a large proportion” do not exist.
“Indeed is full of jobs I don’t believe are real,” said Joseph, a 2025 humanities graduate from a top-tier London university, about the leading online job board Indeed. “The same vibe as those sidebars that say, ‘Hot Singles in Your Area’.” He has applied to 60 jobs so far. “Anything going. Front of house, hospitality, event prep, copywriting…”
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Most of these applications have gone unacknowledged, although once a month Joseph is called in for an interview and unceremoniously ghosted afterwards. He subsides on a combination of freelance writing work and Universal Credit; to keep his benefits, he must attend regular appointments at his local Jobcentre. These are “kind of useless, to be honest.” Job coaches can only shrug their shoulders and provide the kind of advice already available online.
A friend with a first-class Chinese degree corroborates. His appointed job coach “felt really bad for me. They said there was no reason I should be struggling to find a job, and they told me to just keep trying. And really that’s all you can do.”
He signed onto out-of-work benefits while applying for a mixture of grad schemes and minimum-wage jobs in central London. He’s currently working part-time at a London supermarket and waiting to set off for a funded master’s degree abroad.
“Loads of jobs that I’ve applied for say, ‘you didn’t get accepted,’” he said, “but I’ve still seen the same postings up five, six months later. You see it all the time, especially on LinkedIn. It makes you feel useless.”
One Big Four accounting firm outsourced his interview to an AI bot, before ultimately rejecting him. “You’re on a webcam and you’re looking on your screen at yourself,” he explained. “A question shows up and you have about five seconds to think. It’s very uncanny.”
Dermot, 22, recently graduated from his Computer Science BSc at the University of Liverpool and has been looking for a graduate software engineer role for around a year. “My experience has been quite demoralising,” he said, “having next to no human contact. Applications typically include four or five stages… ghosting is incredibly common.”
While doing the rounds on huge job searching sites like Indeed, he regularly runs into opportunities he does not believe are real. “Ghost jobs”, or postings without any corresponding vacancy, are a normal part of being unemployed in 2025. CVs and cover letters never get a reply; job ads get reposted at regular intervals. The employers who post these fake jobs have a myriad of motives, edging from the unethical to the illegal: keeping morale up among overworked employees in case they decide to quit; leading shareholders on; mining and selling candidate data.
One company Dermot points to is registered at an address in Blackburn, and claims to “[build] scalable digital platforms for clients across Europe.” On its Indeed page there are eight active listings for hybrid internships. The briefs run the gamut from software development to graphic design to sales to HR to accounting. All are targeted at new graduates and promise a competitive minimum salary of £38k, visa sponsorship, a “collaborative, mentor-led environment” and a “path to [a] full-time position.”
An email to its listed address immediately bounces back, and its website returns a DNS error. The company’s LinkedIn page lists 30 employees, all of whom live in Pakistan and actually seem to operate through the freelancing site Upwork. A look at Companies House reveals a previous attempt to register the business in the north of England, and a forcible dissolution a year later.
“Are these jobs real?” I asked the company’s director in a WhatsApp message.
“Yes, these jobs are real,” he wrote. “I am still hiring.”
I asked how he planned to cover the cost of eight graduates on salaries of £38k each. He started vacillating.
“Well the jobs are real but we put things on hold as you can see the jobs were posted like 3 months ago…” he typed. “When I said jobs are real it means I am still hiring but a bit of in different context. I am in talk with some investors and I probably lock in couple of weeks and if it happened, I would refresh the jobs.”
I tried to ask about his investors. He referred me instead to a 5 per cent stake he had “just locked” in an American startup. After some more pushing, he eventually told me he would take the postings down. They disappeared from Indeed after a few days. But they were a drop in the ocean. “There’s a large enough number [of these postings] to become noticeable,” said Dermot, “especially with the decreasing number of graduate jobs.”
Many serious jobseekers will attest that they have applied to some of these empty postings. But we have no idea how large the proportion of fake jobs actually is. The BBC, the Times, and multiple local and industry publications have all cited a 2023 study by the career readiness website StandoutCV. It contains some shocking statistics. Almost 60 per cent of veterinary nursing and 46.5 per cent of software engineering vacancies do not exist, it claims. Just over a quarter of advertised jobs in Islington never intended to hire anyone in the first place. But for “ghost jobs”, the study simply substituted listings that had been live for over 30 days.
The issues with this methodology are obvious. Employers are within their rights to spend over a month searching for the ideal candidate; several of my interviewees attested that it was not unusual to face rejection and see the same posting deleted and reposted in month-long stints. If you are looking for a job, there is no real way of gauging what is legitimate and what isn’t. Searching for graduate openings will soon see you lost in the mire.
Some are clearly fake. One LinkedIn search for computer science jobs yielded a WordPress developer position that had been left open for nine months, as well as two invitations to join the “talent pool” of a web design company with a single employee and a total profit of £2,618 in the previous tax year. You can sidestep this Russian Roulette by using your existing connections to tell you who is actually hiring, say the online experts. New graduates, who are entering the market for the first time, lose out again.
The Online Safety Act makes some attempt to wipe out online scams. Large online service providers must use “proportionate systems and processes designed to… prevent individuals from encountering… fraudulent advertisers.” Online job boards are covered in this item, but in practice the onus mostly falls on the user. Indeed, one of the largest in the world, simply asks jobseekers to “report suspected illegal content.” Posting a job advert without a corresponding vacancy or budget is annoying, deceptive and a huge waste of people’s time. But it is not illegal.
Here we are falling behind. In the US, cybersecurity professional Eric Thompson is agitating for a bill he calls the TJAAA, or “Truth in Job Advertising and Accountability Act”. Companies posting job listings without a vacancy would receive fines; applicants would be allowed to pursue legal action against timewasting offenders. A similar bill on the state level passed through the California Assembly in July, and is pending approval from the state’s Senate. Over here, the “ghost jobs” phenomenon last came up in Hansard 11 years ago, in the context of the government’s now-defunct Universal Jobsmatch system.
There is no current proposal to make these phantom jobs illegal. But robust legislation would most likely save the state money in the long run. We are already using Universal Credit to fund graduates through layers of bureaucracy that may often be pointless. And one can only imagine the future cost of a resultant mental health crisis – look up and down the country and you will find young people suspended in states of helplessness, isolation and low confidence because they can’t get jobs that don’t exist. If Labour has any interest in tackling unemployment, they must start by tackling the detritus faced by the unemployed.
Some names were changed in this article.
[See also: Would national service for retirees solve generational inequality?]
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