Humanities & Cultures

As I apply for yet another job, I look at the company’s website for context. I’ve now read their “what we do” section four or five times, and I have a problem – I can’t figure out what they do. There are two possibilities here. One: they don’t know what they do. Two: what they do is so pointless and embarrassing that they dare not spell it out in plain English. “We forge marketing systems at the forefront of the online wellness space” translates to something like “we use ChatGPT to sell dodgy supplements”.

But understanding what so many businesses actually do is the least of my worries. I’m currently among the 5% of Brits who are unemployed. In my six months of job hunting, my total lack of success has begun to make me question my own existence. Just like when you repeat a word over and over until it loses all meaning, when you apply repeatedly for jobs in a similar field, the semantics of the entire situation begin to fall apart like a snotty tissue. About one in five of my job applications elicit a rejection email, usually bemoaning the sheer number of “quality applicants” for the position. For the most part, though – nothing. It’s almost like the job never existed in the first place, and it’s possible that it didn’t.

In 2024, 40% of companies posted listings for “ghost jobs”, nonexistent positions advertised to create the illusion that the company is doing well enough to take on new employees. And this seems like an all-too-easy way to lie about your success. Regulation of job ads is mostly the remit of the Advertising Standards Authority, which – in all its might – has the power to … have a misleading job ad taken down. So with no particularly harsh consequences for employers, why not go on a pretend hiring spree? Ethics in the job market seem to have gone out the window, and the idea of wasting the time of thousands of hapless jobseekers doesn’t seem to matter much.

Stories like this make me feel far less special.