Ghost Jobs vs. Real Openings: Why I Still Believe in the Retained Search

Job seekers have a name for it now: ghost jobs. Postings that sit online for months, sometimes years, with no real intention of hiring anyone. Companies use them to build a talent pipeline "just in case," to make investors think they're growing, or simply because nobody remembered to take them down. Whatever the reason, the result is the same, candidates pour real time and real hope into applications that were never going anywhere.

But ghost jobs aren't the only way companies waste a candidate's time while looking like they're actually hiring.

When "Screening" Isn't Screening at All

I recently came across a job posting where the entire prescreen process was a list of written questions, no call, no human, just a form. Answer these five questions, submit, and someone will "review."

Here's the problem: there's no way to know if a real person wrote those answers. Anyone applying today can run those exact questions through AI and submit polished, thoughtful-sounding responses in under a minute. The company has no idea if they're evaluating the candidate's actual judgment, communication style, experience, or just their ability to copy and paste.

That's not screening. That's the appearance of screening, without any of the substance. And it tells me two things: either the company doesn't have a recruiter who knows how to properly vet candidates, or they do, and they've decided a written form is an acceptable substitute for actually talking to people. Neither is a good sign for the candidates applying, and neither is a good sign for the hiring manager waiting on the other end for a real shortlist.

Why a Real Search Requires a Real Person, Not a Form

A genuine hiring process, the kind I run, means talking to candidates directly. Asking a question, listening to the answer, and asking a follow-up based on what they actually said, not what a script anticipated they might say. It means catching the hesitation in someone's voice when a question touches on something they're less confident about, or hearing the energy shift when they talk about work they're genuinely proud of. None of that comes through in a written form, and none of it can be faked by AI, because it isn't scripted, it's a conversation.

This is exactly why I don't post jobs and wait for applications to trickle in, and I don't outsource the prescreen to a form. I source candidates directly, I talk to every person myself, and I bring hiring managers a shortlist of people I've genuinely vetted, not a stack of resumes and AI-polished answers I've never spoken to.

Ghost jobs and lazy prescreens are two versions of the same problem: companies going through the motions of hiring without actually committing to the work it takes to hire well. If you're a hiring manager and you're wondering why your open roles are taking forever to fill, or why the candidates who do make it through don't seem like a strong fit, it might be worth asking whether your process is actually built to find the right person or just built to look like it is.

Real openings deserve real screening. Anything less is a waste of everyone's time, the candidate's, and yours.

Have you run into a hiring process that looked thorough on paper but fell apart the moment you had a real conversation? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.