\u201cYou\u2019re not really able to take a second to think mid-sentence because it will just assume that you\u2019re finished and then cut you off and on to the next bit.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was a jarring experience, which became stranger after the initially very eager company ghosted her.<\/p>\n
Maclean is now sounding the alarm about companies that post prolifically on sites such as LinkedIn, advertising remote roles with attractive salaries.<\/p>\n
After some digging online, she fears the company that sent an AI agent to interview her was simply after her personal data to train artificial intelligence \u2013 a potential scam or so-called \u201cghost\u201d job, a scenario where a company advertises for a role it has no intention of filling.<\/p>\n
The experience has prompted Maclean to launch a petition to Parliament explicitly banning such job advertisements.<\/p>\n
\u2018Data is king\u2019<\/p>\n
Senior lecturer in organisational psychology at Victoria University Ben Walker doesn\u2019t have \u201ccase-closed\u201d evidence of phantom job listings but feels there is enough online commentary to suggest that advertised roles by certain companies were spurious.<\/p>\n
Companies under fire in online message threads for suspected data harvesting have not responded to RNZ\u2019s requests for comment.<\/p>\n
While recruiters RNZ contacted had not come across ghost jobs in New Zealand, they had heard of such practices.<\/p>\n
One recruiter, with almost 20 years\u2019 experience, said companies posting fake jobs to harvest candidate data was a new con for the industry and had been a topic of discussion among colleagues overseas.<\/p>\n
Chief executive of Tribe Group recruitment agency Bruce Pilbrow found the scenario plausible and said it would be an effective way to gather core information.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a lot happening in the AI space and the online space in the sense of harvesting information,\u201d he said. \u201cData is king.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fake job listing or not, Victoria University senior lecturer in artificial intelligence Andrew Lensen said there was growing concern about where personal information ended up.<\/p>\n
CVs and cover letters contained potentially valuable data, he said, including a person\u2019s name, educational background and even an address.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s your career history, it\u2019s what you\u2019ve learned, the skills you have, and we often don\u2019t think about it that carefully but that is a lot of information.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf it is going into any sort of database or system that could be used for things like AI in the future, then I think people are quite rightfully getting more and more concerned about how the data is being used and where it\u2019s going.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rapid recruitment a red flag<\/p>\n
In her months-long search for work, Maclean said she came across a handful of companies on LinkedIn \u2013 a professional networking platform \u2013 advertising remote jobs with inflated salaries that seemed to \u201cgo nowhere\u201d.<\/p>\n
According to Walker, an intense recruitment drive could be a red flag.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere it\u2019s a company that you\u2019ve never heard of suddenly doing those sorts of things, it potentially raises a few question marks and alarm bells about whether the jobs are legitimate or whether they may be a cover or some means to another end.\u201d<\/p>\n
As a global platform, LinkedIn differed greatly from job sites such as Seek and Trade Me, he said. <\/p>\n
In his opinion, it had undergone a transformation in recent years: \u201cPeople talk about the slopification of LinkedIn\u201d.<\/p>\n
In response to questions from RNZ, a LinkedIn spokesperson said the company was investing in free verifications for jobs, recruiters and company pages, and that every job must be authentic and accurately represented.<\/p>\n
Neither Seek nor Trade Me considered ghost jobs to be a material issue on their sites, citing the financial commitment to advertise a role, verification processes, and the ability for job seekers to report suspect listings.<\/p>\n
A petition and a warning<\/p>\n
Maclean has since found work but the process was demoralising to the point that she almost forgot what she was good at.<\/p>\n
\u201cJobs that I was really keen on I even took to sending people cupcakes with a little QR code in the icing, literally just to cut through the noise to get a phone call.\u201d<\/p>\n
The exhausting process, in addition to her experience with the suspect company, has prompted a petition to Parliament to get ghost jobs explicitly banned, in line with crackdowns overseas.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s incredibly difficult out there.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t fix that for people, but this seems like a really easy one … at least the things that you do put the effort in [for] should be real.\u201d<\/p>\n
– RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cYou\u2019re not really able to take a second to think mid-sentence because it will just assume that you\u2019re…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":620303,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[365,38534,1060,138,115,3105,2082,9657,8594,594,3112,7052,111,139,69,90,302171,1361],"class_list":["post-620302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-ai","tag-argue","tag-ban","tag-business","tag-calls","tag-data","tag-for","tag-ghost","tag-harvest","tag-interviews","tag-job","tag-mary","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-on","tag-seeker","tag-that"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=620302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620302\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/620303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=620302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=620302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=620302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}