Ghost jobs and AI are creating issues for applicants

In addition to a historically difficult hiring market, not seen since the aftermath of the great recession, recent graduates face two novel challenges: an increase in “ghost jobs” and the rise of artificial intelligence.

Ghost jobs describe openings companies list that don’t actually exist or have already been filled, but remain posted. Marrow says that when she sees a position online, she’s not sure whether the listing is real or not.

With these ghost jobs making up 30% of openings listed, according to a MyPerfectResume analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, spending time differentiating between legitimate and fake postings adds another layer of difficulty to the job hunt.

Once an applicant is able to discern real positions from the fake ones and submit their resume, cover letter and references, there is no guarantee that their application will be seen by a human being. The advent of artificial intelligence has led to roughly 90% of companies using AI to review resumes, according to the World Economic Forum.

Marrow wondered if her resume was the reason she wasn’t getting hired, so she got it reviewed.

“They said it was fine,” Marrow said. “But then they were like, ‘Just use AI, it’ll tell you what to put on there.’”

With AI use becoming a day-to-day fixture in many people’s lives, and recruiters even giving advice on how to use the technology for your resume, job applications are heading towards a process where there is less of a human element, instead replaced by a conversation between AI-generated resumes evaluated by AI reviewers.

This technology is not only changing the hiring process — it is actively eliminating jobs.

When choosing what to study at college, Fiona Gaugush says she picked computer science for the same reason as many others: the promise of job security. Once hailed as the surefire way to find work after college, recent computer science graduates are now struggling to find jobs.

Unemployment rates are sitting at 6.1% for the major, more than double the percentage of stereotypically riskier degrees like art history, which has a 3% unemployment rate, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of New York study.

Gaugush works with Marrow at the Center City coffee shop and graduated from Barnard College, a private liberal arts college in New York City, this past May. Her plan was to move back to Philly and live with her mom, while applying to jobs and working in the service industry.

So far, she has not been able to break into the tech industry and said that a recent conversation with a software engineer confirmed fears of AI replacing entry-level workers.

“He was telling me that it’s true, they’re developing AI to do these menial, sort of developmental tasks,” Gaugush said.

There are two ways that AI can affect job duties, according to Samuel Solomon, an assistant professor of economics at Temple. The first is that the technology has the capability to perform the main task of the occupation. The second is AI replaces only supplementary duties, allowing the worker to focus on the most important matters at hand.

“The idea there is that it’s going to have a lot more implications for employment because now AI is actually doing the main task of what you had to do.” Solomon said. “Versus in the latter case, it’s really refocusing your time on the main tasks and making you more productive.”

Solomon said that computer science jobs fall into the former category. Since AI has shown that it can do a lot of these main tasks, the demand for entry-level workers is slowing down.

Pointing to data from Revelio Labs, Solomon explained that entry-level job postings are down in general. In these types of roles that are highly exposed to AI, the number of listings have dropped almost 41% from January 2023, according to Revelio Labs.