It Was the Best of Times — Or Was It?
By nearly every headline metric, the American job market of the past two years has been thriving. In early 2023, the Commerce Department reported that unemployment had fallen to its lowest level in 54 years. As of this April, the U.S. notched its 27th consecutive month with sub-4% unemployment — a feat matched only once since World War II. The Center for Economic and Policy Research celebrated this milestone, comparing it to the economic boom of the late 1960s. Meanwhile, Investopedia enthused that American workers were enjoying “one of the best job markets in history.”
On the surface, everything looked stellar.
But underneath, a more unsettling reality was taking shape — one not captured by headline unemployment figures. Because when you dig beneath the numbers, you’ll find that much of the modern hiring landscape has become an elaborate illusion — one increasingly constructed, sustained, and manipulated by automation.
The Rise of Ghost Jobs
The first crack in the façade came with the rise of "ghost jobs" — job listings that remain posted long after positions have been filled, or worse, that never existed in the first place. These phantom opportunities have become so prevalent that in 2022, Clarify Capital conducted a survey of over 1,000 hiring managers specifically focused on the issue.
Their findings were eye-opening: Half of the respondents admitted to keeping job listings up just in case “the company was always open to new people.” Nearly as many admitted to posting jobs to create the impression of growth or to keep existing employees “motivated.” Some admitted the role had already been filled. A third offered no rationale at all.
So if you’ve ever crafted the perfect cover letter only to never hear back, there’s a significant chance your application went to a job that never existed — or worse, one that was intentionally misleading.
Automation: The Quiet Architect of Illusion
Automation plays a large role in perpetuating these ghost listings. Platforms like Workable offer employers tools to automatically clone and repost aging job ads, reminding users to delete “Copy of” from job titles so they don’t accidentally reveal the ruse. Propellum, a company that specializes in scraping job listings from across the web, openly promotes the practice of duplicating listings en masse to inflate job board traffic — and, by extension, advertising revenue.
In this system, quantity trumps quality. Job boards recycle content not to better connect employers with job seekers, but to attract more site visitors and ad dollars. As Propellum helpfully notes, this boosts SEO and "keeps visibility high."
Indeed, the biggest player in the market doesn’t even hide its methods. It proudly states that it scrapes jobs from “thousands of sources,” claiming responsibility for 47% of all hires in the U.S. But those aggregated listings often linger far beyond their expiration date. One hiring manager reportedly found a role she'd filled months earlier still active on the site — and it remained online for nearly a week even after she requested its removal.
LinkedIn is no better. While the platform promotes “AI-assisted” tools to help recruiters write job descriptions and follow-up messages, it also admits that many of its “basic job posts” are simply pulled from other job boards.
Enter the Scammers
But what’s worse than applying to a fake job? Applying for a fake job designed to scam you.
The explosion of automation and AI has created a golden age for online employment fraud. Armed with spoofed domains, interactive voice emulators, and cloned job listings, today’s scammers can trick job seekers into handing over everything from Social Security numbers to bank account information.
Author Paul Fuhr recounted falling for such a scam: In under two weeks, he applied, interviewed, and was "hired" for a job that didn’t exist. Within seconds, the scammers had enough data to steal his identity, open accounts, and wreak havoc on his financial life.
According to the FTC, fake jobs and “business opportunity” scams surged in 2023 — five times higher than in 2018 — costing victims nearly half a billion dollars.
The Human Cost
This digital wasteland of bots, scams, and ghost jobs has taken a psychological toll on job seekers. Reddit, TikTok, and YouTube are full of first-person accounts of hopelessness, frustration, and exhaustion. People describe submitting hundreds of applications and getting ghosted over and over. Others speak of interviews that led nowhere and rejections that never came.
Some describe losing confidence entirely: “I’ve been at it for 80 days,” one Redditor wrote. “The self-doubt gets really real.”
While critics might point to poor résumés, weak networking, or inadequate interview skills, the sheer volume of such accounts makes it clear: not everyone can be doing it wrong. The system itself is broken.
And the data backs this up. In 2023, the average time to hire reached a record 44 days. LinkedIn reported a 10% drop in hiring activity. Analysts like Oliver Allen from Pantheon Macroeconomics have predicted near-zero private-sector job growth shortly.
Job Seekers Strike Back — With AI
But just as employers turned to AI to streamline and obscure hiring, job seekers began using AI to fight back.
Following ChatGPT’s release in late 2022, job seekers gained powerful new tools. Now they could generate customized cover letters, polish résumés, and answer application questions — all in seconds. Apps like Sonara, LazyApply, and Jobscan automate every aspect of the job hunt. Users can even program AI agents to submit applications continuously, adapting and learning with each attempt.
What started as a desperate workaround has grown into a full-blown arms race.
The AI Arms Race
Employers responded in kind. With applicant volumes soaring, many began using AI detectors to weed out applications generated by bots. Candidates then turned to AI tools specifically designed to bypass those detectors. Companies launched AI-powered interviewers; job seekers countered with real-time AI-assisted answers. And on and on it went.
AI is now drafting résumés, screening candidates, conducting interviews, sending follow-ups, and negotiating offers — sometimes without human intervention at any point. What used to be a human-centered process is becoming a battle between increasingly advanced algorithms.
As one Redditor put it: “It felt very meta to have AI writing bullet points that some HR AI would evaluate.”
Welcome to the Dead Indeed Theory
We are rapidly approaching the “Dead Indeed Theory” — a twist on the Dead Internet Theory — where most job listings are written, reposted, screened, and responded to by machines.
In this future:
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AI writes a job ad and posts it.
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Another AI tweaks a résumé and submits it.
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AI filters the résumé using keyword scanning.
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AI detects whether the résumé was AI-generated.
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AI sends a personalized follow-up message.
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AI schedules an interview with an AI.
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The applicant uses AI to answer AI-generated questions.
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AI offers a salary based on acceptance probability.
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The hired applicant trains and manages AI assistants.
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Eventually, AI decides they should be laid off.
The job market is becoming a self-sustaining loop of artificial intelligence — a process so automated and opaque that it may render the idea of “job hunting online” obsolete.
The Bottom Line
If the past few years have proven anything, it’s that the job market is no longer a fair fight — and in many cases, no longer even a human one. Automation and AI have brought incredible efficiency, but they’ve also spawned confusion, frustration, deception, and a new breed of scams.
It’s not just hard to find a job online — it’s becoming harder to tell if there is a job behind that listing at all.
But hey, at least this article was written by a real person... right?