The Ghost Job Economy:

Let’s stop pretending shareholders are confused, naïve, or “fooled” by today’s job market. They aren’t. They’re the architects of it.

The endless job postings.

The silent inboxes.

The cheerful headlines about “low unemployment” while skilled professionals rot in limbo.

This isn’t dysfunction. It’s design.

The Illusion They Love

Institutional investors—names like Vanguard and BlackRock, which collectively hold 20% or more of many S&P 500 companies—don’t evaluate companies the way workers do. They don’t care whether you get hired. They care about signals.

And one of the loudest signals in earnings calls and investor decks is this:

-----“Robust applicant volume.”----

• High applicant numbers suggest:
• A deep, “efficient” talent pipeline
• No urgency to raise wages
• Strong managerial control over labor costs

When a company can say it received 500 applications for one role, it doesn’t matter whether the role is ever filled. The signal alone reassures investors that labor is abundant, replaceable, and cheap.

That keeps earnings per share (EPS) looking healthy—and dividends flowing.

Why Posting Jobs Is Cheaper Than Hiring People

Hiring is expensive. Conservatively, onboarding a new employee costs 1.5x their salary once you factor in training, benefits, and ramp-up time.

Posting jobs? Nearly free.

So companies stockpile applications instead. They create databases of unpaid labor interest—your résumé, your time, your emotional energy—without committing to wages.

This lets executives:

• Delay hiring until it’s cheapest
• Suppress wage growth
• Claim “talent shortages” while refusing to pay market rates

In effect, workers subsidize corporate optionality with unpaid effort.

Low Unemployment, High Leverage

Here’s the real power move:

Low official unemployment plus high job postings gives companies leverage to pay PMP-level talent retail wages.

They can say:

• “The labor market is tight” (to justify ghost postings)
• “Applicants are plentiful” (to deny raises)
• “We’re actively hiring” (to appease shareholders)

All at once.

That contradiction isn’t accidental. It’s profitable.

Why Florida Feels Like a Lie (Even If It’s “Legal”)

Florida’s official unemployment rate looks great on paper—hovering around 3.1–3.9% in 2024. But that number (called U-3) only counts people who:

• Are unemployed
• Are available for work
• Have actively searched in the last four weeks

That excludes:

• Discouraged workers who stopped applying
• People stuck in involuntary part-time jobs
• Long-term unemployed whose benefits ran out

When you look at U-6, which includes those groups, Florida’s real labor slack jumps to 6.6%—more than double the headline rate.

So no, agencies aren’t “lying” in a legal sense. But politicians and executives selectively highlight the rosiest number while ignoring the fuller picture that workers actually live in.

The HR Quota Problem

This brings us to HR quotas.

HR isn’t paid primarily to hire. They’re paid to hit metrics:

• Number of postings
• Number of applicants
• Compliance checkboxes
• Pipeline growth

An HR professional can meet every KPI, earn bonuses, and keep their job without a single hire—as long as dashboards look active.

To shareholders, those dashboards translate into:

• “Operational efficiency”
• “Strong talent brand”
• “Preparedness for future growth”

To workers, it translates into silence.

This isn’t about bad people. It’s about incentives. HR executes what executives demand, and executives answer to shareholders—not applicants.

Why It Feels Like Abuse (Because It Is)

Your time fuels the illusion.

Your résumé props up investor narratives.

Your unpaid labor keeps wages low.

And when frustration spills over, it’s easy to aim it at the nearest visible person—an HR rep, a recruiter, a name in an email signature. But they’re often just as trapped, chasing quotas to avoid being laid off themselves.

The real beneficiaries sit several layers above.

How to Beat the Game Instead of Playing It

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

Applying through ATS systems in this environment is volunteering.

The leverage move is to bypass the quota machine entirely.

• Pitch managers and executives directly on LinkedIn
• Frame your value in shareholder language:
• “Operational fixes that improve ROI, reduce friction, and protect margins”
• Show outcomes, not credentials
• Treat HR as a compliance layer, not a gateway

If shareholders care about returns, speak in returns.

Final Thought

This economy isn’t broken. It’s optimized—for people who already own it.

The ghost jobs, the selective statistics, the endless applications with no response—these aren’t failures of coordination. They’re mechanisms of control in a labor market engineered to look healthy while extracting maximum value from workers.

Once you see that, the goal isn’t to beg for entry.

It’s to stop feeding the illusion—and force value to meet you where it actually counts.