EP117 | Meet the Founder Taking on Ghost Jobs

[00:00:14] Hey everybody, it's Tim Sackett, HR Famous. We're back. And I'm actually, today I have a guest. This is funny thing is like, John, when I first started HR Famous, we were like no guest. It was just like Katie and Jessica Lee and Madeline and I, all of which you know. For those who don't know, John Strauss is the CEO, co-founder of Greenhouse, which is one of the top ATSs in the world. And I actually love talking to John because he's one of the guys or the people in our space within

[00:00:43] HR technology, recruiting technology, whatever I want to say. He's just real. He's going to tell you like it is. He's going to say all these things. And he just recently became famous, or should I say infamous, in the Wall Street Journal. And so John, welcome. Go ahead. I mean, I kind of introduced you, but hi, how are you doing? Thanks for having me on, Tim. So I want to start. The title of the Wall Street Journal article, which we will laugh about,

[00:01:10] fake job postings are becoming a real problem. One in five jobs advertised is fake, quote unquote, or not filled. According to a new analysis, more soul crushing than ever. That was an actual quote from you, John, the soul crushing from ever. I stand by that. It is. But we're going to talk about this. There's a couple of quotes on here. And by the way, the author of this, Lynn Cook is a Pulitzer Prize winner, right? So a great journalist by award winning,

[00:01:37] and still some things are taken out of context. And we're going to talk about that. Companies have a number of nefarious and normal reasons for posting, not quite real jobs. It was talked about, here's the one that got me because she put in here, Strauss notes, most of Greenhouse's 7,500 plus customers, which include really major brands like HubSpot and Major League Baseball,

[00:02:00] don't post ghost jobs. And then the very next paragraph was still nearly 70% of companies using Greenhouse posted at least one ghost job in the second quarter of last year, blah, blah, blah. And you were like going, oh. So I want to start there. Are people really posting ghost jobs, fake jobs? Is this a real thing? Like, let's define our terms first, right? What are we talking about here? So overall,

[00:02:29] what we're hearing from candidates was it's terrible out there, right? We feel like we're getting ghosted, bait and switched, all these horrendous stories. You can watch it on like job search TikTok, if that's still up. And so we start surveying candidates, like thousands of candidates, not even people applying to Greenhouse companies, just any company. And you're hearing all these like horrendous stories. And one of the things that came up in there was a suspicion that

[00:02:54] like, hey, I'm applying this job and I don't even know if they're hiring. Like I, because it's been up forever and what's actually happening there. And so we started researching in the data of like, well, how often do companies ghost candidates? How much, how often do they not send out rejection emails? How often do you see they close the job, they hired someone and there's 500 people sitting there in the pipeline that they never talked to, right? There was nothing ever done with that candidate. And in fact, like it does happen, right? Not everybody, but it does happen. And then what

[00:03:21] we also saw is there were jobs that were posted and like nothing happened for the whole job, right? They didn't interview people. They didn't reject people. They didn't make a hire. And those were called ghost jobs, right? And I think that it resonates because people have that feeling like, oh, that's what happened to me. And so, yeah, I think it happens. I think that it's probably not nefarious. There's not like a great reason to like scam people by putting up

[00:03:47] fake jobs. And so I think that's a bit taken out of context. I think it's a lot of times sloppiness, right? Yeah. It's as people are like, oh, I posted, we posted a bunch of jobs. We actually pulled one back. We forgot. Or maybe they posted the job and they're actually hiring somebody internally. Like there's various reasons of what happens inside an org. That was the big disconnect. And it's not just the Wall Street. I mean, everybody, it seems like in the last, like probably nine to 12 months, this has been talked about a lot. And it always gets really good traffic. It always gets, because like you said,

[00:04:15] it's a super pain point for candidates. If you apply to a job and you know within your heart of hearts, in your background, your experience, your education, your skills, like I know I'm the great fit for that job. And then you hear nothing. In your mind, it's easy for you to context that and go, they're posting a job that they're not even hiring for. Why would they do that? Right. Or you've made this big investment of time and emotion. Like you imagined yourself in that

[00:04:42] role. You found like, I want to be in that role. And you fill out the whole thing. Your expectation was that somebody would read it and consider you. And if they don't think they would at least tell you that. Yeah. Like the metaphor I always use is that imagine you walked into a deli and there was like 200 people in line in front of you. Like you turn around and walk out. Yeah. Yeah. Like you're going to wait two hours for a sandwich. Right. Or if you did, you'd like see there were 200 people in front of you and you get to the front of the line, you wouldn't be like, Hey, how come that

[00:05:08] took two hours? Like, no, your expectation was you saw the whole 200 people. With job search, you don't get that. You just see the application, you apply. You don't realize that you're a thousandth in line. Well, someone's going to go, wait a minute. LinkedIn does that. You're like, well, not really. When you do that, like didn't think it shows, Oh, there's 375 people who applied to this. They don't really know if you apply. Yeah. They don't know. Are they still active? Like there's no expectation set of like, are you going to get seen or not? And so you just feel like this disconnect that why didn't you, why didn't they respond back? That's really disrespectful.

[00:05:37] Yeah. And I get that. Right. And so I think that generally the reason the media has paying so much attention to this is because it is such, it resonates with so many people that like everyone's been a job, everybody's been a candidate. You know how bad it feels when you apply. Now we've got this AI armors race thing where you go on and everyone's saying, well, I applied to a hundred jobs. I applied to 200 jobs. If you're not applying to a hundred jobs, you're, you're not competitive. And so they're, so they're an armors race with each other. And there's FOMO that you have to apply

[00:06:06] to all these jobs, which of course we know what's happening behind the scenes is that the companies are now getting inundated with a thousand applications that they don't want to read all of them. And so it hasn't solved the problem for anybody. Right. Well, there's a weird thing that's going on too, where if you think about like the, how candidates are using AI, not just to apply to a lot of jobs quickly, they're also using AI to build a specific profile resume application for each job that more closely

[00:06:32] matches. So, so now we have doubling down, Hey, by the way, I can apply to more jobs quickly. Also, I'm going to make each profile match the job description so closely that whatever like recruiters looking at it, go, Oh my gosh, this person is a perfect match. Now you have on the other side, you have these recruiters going, I have doubled the amount of applications and I have way more people that look like they're a closer match, but I had really no idea if they are or not because everybody's using AI to kind of do

[00:06:59] this. You know, let me finish one last point on the candidate side. Then let's switch over and talk about that recruiter side and say, what's actually happening there? How are they grappling with this? Right. The last point I make about the candidate side is that is one of the dominant emotions we hear from folks is helplessness. Is that you need a job? Like it's a big, major thing in your life. Maybe you're miserable, your current job, you're looking for the next thing and the whole process is opaque. You don't know where you stand with anybody, right?

[00:07:28] You don't really feel like you have the ability to differentiate because no matter how well you personalize your resume, everyone else is doing the same thing with the AI, right? And so the whole thing's out of your control and that feels horrendous. Yeah. And so that's why I think there's so much attention and heat on this is because like, that's all really honest, right? Yeah. Now, if we switch over to the company side, it's been leaner times the last year or two. And so you've got leaner recruiting teams who are being asked to do more with less, right?

[00:07:56] And more legitimate candidates looking for jobs. And then you say like, they're getting way more inbound applicants, right? And you say, oh, well that makes their life so easy. They got applicants. It's like, yeah, yes and no. Like, because they're cool. You hear them say, it's like, do these people really want this job or are they robo applying to a hundred different companies? John, it's so easy though for both candidates and recruiters to blame each other on this ghosting

[00:08:20] thing. Should a candidate, like if they accept an interview, ghost that interview or ghost the job? No, no, they should. That's terrible. Should a recruiter also ghost a candidate that applies to a job? No, it's awful. And here's what I know. Cause like, I know enough of the technology for greenhouse that says, Hey, if a recruiter got 200 people that applied and they already had an internal candidate, they decided to hire easily with like one button, they could disposition the 200

[00:08:48] that would get an email that said, Hey, thanks. No, thanks. You know, please apply again. And here's a 10% coupon for an appetite, whatever you want. They do all the crazy stuff, right? The technology could do that. But we know that the data from the, you guys already know this, but the talent board data with Kevin Grossman as well is like close to 50% of candidates are still saying they don't get disposition. They never hear. My own son, Cameron, when he was going through his

[00:09:14] job search classically, he had kept an entire spreadsheet and it was like 118 jobs that he applied for. Or I think it was under 20% actually ever replied to anything for him. It's just shocking that that's the case. Yeah. I mean, I, I agree. I also like, I mean, there's lots of theories as to why people don't do it, whether it's sloppiness or like, Oh, just keep them engaged, whatever. Yeah. I've always thought there's another thing, which is like the emotional toll of pressing that button.

[00:09:40] Yeah. Like there's a button in greenhouse you can press to say, I'm going to reject 500 people. So you press that button, you know, you're ruining the day of 500 people. And like, it is better to let them know than to not let them know. But I also think about the psychic weight of pressing that button and how much as a recruiter, your job is not in hiring it's in rejecting. Yeah. And that's really difficult. I just think we do a terrible job of communicating to candidates

[00:10:05] the realities of what's going on behind the scenes. You know, like again, like I might the same, my same son will go, he'll laugh. He'll go, dad, I just got a rejection email from a job that I applied to 270 some days ago, whatever. And it's usually at the end of the years, like December 29th, they're cleaning up for the end of the year and they're just dispositioning like crazy. And so like those things go out and like, he just is like, I don't understand. I'm like, well,

[00:10:31] and you try to explain to him, like, again, that sloppiness of it or having a hiring manager open a job and you go, Hey, you know, look, we got you these candidates. You haven't done anything. We're sitting on this for six months now. Can we just close it? And they go, no, I still want to see who's applying. So there's a really important dynamic. You just, you just hit on there, right? Like this is counterintuitive to people who aren't in the business, right? Is you think, Oh, the market shifted. There's way more candidates than jobs. It's easy to get candidates.

[00:10:59] You should hire faster. Nope. It's the opposite of that. Right. In the opposite in 2021, whenever there's a big boom, right? The company has realized, Ooh, the candidates could go to any, there's tons of hiring going on. The candidates have lots of choice. So if you find a candidate that you think is good, you grab immediately. So hiring managers were forced into really fast decisions right now. It's the opposite. They're like, Oh, there's always more folks out there. I'm going to wait for that perfect unicorn. So it drives the recruiter crazy. Cause they're like,

[00:11:28] come on, let's go. And it means you're now stalling all these other candidates. And so that is another dynamic that squeezing the recruiters and creating this bad experience for everyone. It's the hiring managers think they can get away with being slow. So what can we do for candidates from a technology perspective? You know, they think there's so many things that we could do. I mean, obviously, you know, candidates are using AI to recruiters use AI to start giving feedback. I know that becomes like a

[00:11:55] legal, like so many companies are like, well, we can't use AI to match. And so I've heard that consistently and like, well, I wouldn't say Matt, they could use AI to match, but they can't use it to, they don't want to use it to force rank. Right. Right. But then they can like infer a bunch of like insights from the resume. We feel like our humans better at force ranking than the AI. Like, I don't know, whatever. So I have a bunch of theories that predict features we're about to

[00:12:21] launch. Yeah. So is this going to be like totally self-serving as I talk about some of this stuff? I know, but I, but again, we, we have to figure out a better way to like communicate, get it. It's like, so I think I have three theories. One is around how to reset the power dynamic to make it not so uneven. And I'll talk about how to do that in a second. Number two is how do we create and surface new data beyond what's on the resume? New things to differentiate people,

[00:12:49] to give candidates the ability to like say more about themselves and companies, better ways to filter. And then three is how do we make it a race to the top? Because this is one of the other things that like nobody talked about in these articles, but it's actually like one of those interesting things is that a whole bunch of companies out there are awesome. Yeah. They're not ghosting people. They're not doing ghost jobs. They are treating people awesome. And if a company is trying that hard right now in this moment to differentiate themselves and treat you awesome,

[00:13:18] how do you think it's going to be to work at that company? Yeah. These are the places everybody wants to work at and like, let's make that easier. Yeah. Those are my three theories. So like how we do that first one, reach out to power dynamic. I think we just give candidates some transparency and some control, right? So the ability to know like, where is my, what is the status of my application? How about how turn around? We launched a feature already called job alerts where it's like, instead of you having to stalk this company and say, I really want to work at this company. I want to know when they launch a new job. It's like,

[00:13:47] no, no, no. And every greenhouse customer can go and you can sign up for an alert and say, let me know every time a relevant job to me launches at a company and I get to go apply first. Right. Just ease the burden of the whole thing, right? Like you create a profile on greenhouse once and then we can one click pre-fill the job application everywhere. Like nice. Create more applications, but like that's nice and easy. So there's a pile of things I think we can do to just give them more, even self-scheduling, right? Like just control over your own time. Yeah.

[00:14:17] To say, when do you want to interview versus here's the slot we have, right? Like these are all very helpful things. Like, so when you think about, Hey, I'm a candidate. I applied to this job. I can, I can log into my dashboard and see where my application is. What I would love to be able, if I'm a candidate, those also go, okay, Hey, nothing's happened. My candidate was submitted. The recruiter has it in their inbox, blah, blah, blah. That's my status. Right. Yeah. I would love to see the job status. So to go, Oh, by the way though, there is 180 people that also

[00:14:46] applied by the way, there's seven that have been screened. There's one that's actually interviewing. Like to me, then I go, okay, at least I know something is happening. We're debating this actively as to how to do this. The companies are hesitant to share all of that. Oh yeah. I get it. Because they want to have, they'd rather unbalanced, have more applicants than less. Right. It also goes back to that power dynamic too. There's a little bit of this, Hey, I don't want them to see what's going on. I don't want them to know I have 200 applicants, but I've

[00:15:16] only screened seven. Right. Or like, or just like expose like, Hey, you're a thousandth in line at the deli. Don't bother, move on. Like the companies don't want to say that there's nothing, there's no win in that for them. They feel like, and so we're debating how do we, what data can we expose that the company is okay with showing at the, that Canada gets some clue as to what's happening. Right. So agree. Next piece of it, the whole create surface new data. I don't

[00:15:42] want to give it all away, but, but a lot of it's just about intent is that how can we let people express intent and say, and use that as a filter? So simple one is that job alerts feature, right? So imagine you subscribe to this company every time they open a job, I guess I want that one. So let's say as a company, you now have 800 applicants and five people have been like subscribed to your company for a month or two. And the other ones are doing robo apply. Yeah.

[00:16:08] Like it doesn't mean they're qualified. It's not a skills assessment. Right. But it isn't, it is a show of intent. Yeah. And so I'm like, that's actually relevant. We have to back out a little, cause I wouldn't like candidates and also like, obviously other HRTA people listening to this to really understand that what you're, what you found in the data is that if somebody joins your talent network and all of this stuff, there's a greater desire for them to actually want to come work for your company versus somebody that's just like, Hey, I'm jamming

[00:16:37] in my resume to every company, like across the board. What I would love to see is some longitudinal data to say, so yeah, we made more of these hires from this intent, but also from a performance standpoint, like it's, you know, it's better than these cold hires. Right. So obviously we've got to get everybody to do it and make the hires so we can do that. But I think we're going to do is, is there's been a number of different signals. We're going to allow people to create about what is the bullseye of the job that they absolutely want. And so can we match

[00:17:03] people on their intent and their desire, not just their current skills and then see, do they get hired then more frequently and do they actually succeed? I'm a big believer in that. I believe that if you're a fan, cause like we always think, Oh, well it's just a unicorn brands that people are going to want to go work for it. No, like you might be the company down the street from somebody where their best friend worked and they just had great things to say. And they're like, I really want to work there too. It's like, it's two miles from my house. And then like everything

[00:17:30] just aligns perfectly. And I love your mission and blah, blah, blah. Like everybody has fans. You might not have as many fans as Google, but you still have fans. Yeah. And when I say it's like, if you ever do bother to read cover letters, what you will see is that many of the cover letters are generic or they're written by AI or whatever. And a couple will come through and you're like, no, this person really wants this job. You've done their research. They want this company in this job. And that stands out. And whether

[00:17:56] they're qualified or not, you do give them a second look. And I'm like, how do we like mechanize that and make that easier to express? Because I think it's relevant to me. Like the, the logical metaphor for that is, um, there's a whole thing where these college admissions, college admissions, it used to be when you and I, you know, we both typed things out on a typewriter and we had unique essays for every school. We both applied to three schools, right? I'll speak for you. Right. Now it's like,

[00:18:24] Oh, the common app you could do once, apply once hit 25 checkboxes. And now you've applied to all these places and the schools are absolutely inundated. And so they're saying, Oh my God, what do we do? And so they created a system of intent called early admissions where you can say, you can apply to 25, but you can only pick one. And if you say yes, then you're going. And the schools have realized that's how they fill their class is they get a whole bunch of people who actually want to be there. And like, I think that's, what's going to happen with job search.

[00:18:53] I like that. Is that, is that, that filter of like, yeah, I want to hire a bunch of people who want to be here. Like, well, and if you talk to most hiring managers in most executives, they're just like, I mean, I have this conversation a dozen times a year where there's like, if you just found me 25 people who wanted to be here, like we would, we would teach them how to do this job. Now again, that's not every job, but like so many jobs are that way. It's a relevant filter, right? It's not totally like you can hire. And so we're creating that.

[00:19:21] And then the third one was around making a race to the top was that to my earlier point, like there's a lot of awesome companies who are, and I think the candidates are figuring this out. There's a whole set of companies out there who say we're going to win as a business because of our people. So we're going to like invest in recruiting, invest in management and our culture. This is going to be how we differentiate as a business or one of the ways we're going to differentiate is our people practices. And like, those are the companies you kind of want

[00:19:51] to work for, right? There's a whole nother set who are going to say, eh, people are kind of a commodity. And so we can get away with treating them not so well. And like, we've probably all worked in both at this point. Yeah. And I think the candidates are figuring out which are which and, or they're trying to, and I would have never believed this like five years ago, but I think it's becoming true now is that the candidates actually pay attention to the ATS now. We hear it

[00:20:20] every day. Oh, I love when a company uses greenhouse. That's a good sign. And if I see they're using those other guys, like, no, I just closed the browser window. Like I'm not going to bother. And it's not just because the application's bad. It's because the company is telling you they don't care. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so you launched this feature greenhouse verified where it's like, no, no, the company can earn basically verification badges that they're going to be fair and transparent and communicative. Like they don't ghost. Yep. And basically like,

[00:20:47] they're not, they're not badges that you desire. They're badges you have to earn based on like how you actually treat people. And so let's create a race to the top and like have companies compete and like win these badges and show candidates, let's create a new expectation that candidates get to see. Oh my God, this is awesome. These companies are the ones who are trying super hard. And so I want to highlight all these awesome companies. Hey everybody, I'm Lori Rudiman. What are you doing? Working? Nah. You're listening to a podcast about work and that barely counts. So while you're at it,

[00:21:17] check out my show, Punk Rock HR now on the Work Defined Network. We chat with smart people about work, power, politics, and money. Are we succeeding? Are we fixing work? Probably not. Work still sucks, but tune in for some fun, a little nonsense, and a fresh take on how to fix work once and for all.

[00:22:10] Here's one of the problems we saw, like we did a big candidate survey and we, you know, one of the questions we asked them was like, Hey, if you apply to a job and you get one of these, thanks, no thanks kind of emails, do you consider that, that you've gotten the feedback you wanted? 87% said, no, it's spam. Basically, they don't consider that communication. So then we go, okay, well shoot. Like, I mean, again, going back to the recruiter side, if I have 250 people who apply,

[00:22:39] I can't give personalization back to them. I do think with AI, we can probably get a little bit better, right? To your point, there's a legal, there's a legal issues of you want to be, you know? Yeah. I don't think we would ever go back into Hammond to give you feedback. Like, Hey, you applied to this job and you have no background for this, right? And like, let AI go forward and do that. Right. I think people are nervous to like, let the AI interpret their scorecard and say, here's why we're saying no. And like, write the email and send it to Canada. Oh yeah. Yeah. I think people are nervous about that.

[00:23:07] What I'm interested in to see though, if there could be a little bit more back and forth where a candidate goes, like, you know, he gets this email says, Hey, thank you for applying. Like we've found someone that fit better, blah, blah. And they go, can you tell me, right? Like why I was never even considered? Like, and maybe like, and so, and then actually having a response that says like, well, I wish I could. But again, we had 300 people that applied for this job. And typically that's not a one-time conversation.

[00:23:34] It's like, well, the person says, no, no, no, I actually do have that feedback. I do have that experience. It's like, okay, now you're going to go back and forth. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why folks avoid the conversation. It's, it's tough. I mean, I think there is like some opacity that is inherently built into it. I always had this concept, which everyone always shoots down immediately. Right. But if you were a TA team and like, there's always back to the capacity. We don't have the capacity to be able to give personalized feedback. And let's say, and again, there's, there's some inequity here,

[00:24:04] but I just play along with this game for a minute and said, Hey, if you want real feedback about your application, you can push this button and purchase 20 minutes with a recruiter for $25. And it'll get real feedback. And people are like, Oh my God, that's horrible. Like then it's inequity. Oh, it's only people that could afford it. And I'm like, but no, but like, let's think about potentially how can we get feedback? Right. Because now as a head of TA, I could go, look,

[00:24:32] I'm going to just hire a feedback team. I have 10 people, right. That are actually going to do this. And we're actually funding it. And does that then do now people go, shoot, like I just talked to ABC company and holy crap, I got the best feedback ever on my application and I had to pay for it, but like, it was amazing. Yeah. It immediately gets shut down. And I'm like, okay, well, if they can't pay for it, could AI then maybe one day be that right. Or, or again, do we run into

[00:25:01] too many legal things when the AI goes, Hey, you went to U of M that's a shitty school. We don't, okay. No, I'm just kidding. Like you went to U of M. He's a great school. I saw to my son. I was like, we got through 26 minutes without making any jabs about Michigan or Michigan state. That's like a record for us. I mean, I hear, I hear you, I hear like the, the motivation that I don't know. I can see why everybody shoots it down. That's a problematic in there.

[00:25:26] Like nobody, we don't come up with a solution. The solution is we don't have capacity to give real feedback in every application. So exactly then how would you actually do it? Again, we go, we go back to the start of this conversation of ghosting what people feel. And like the core problem is we have too many people applying to the jobs to actually give them real feedback. Yeah. And I think also you have to think about it by like by stage of the interview process,

[00:25:52] right? So 800 people apply and you end up with like 20 people that you do a phone screen of and call it five people. You do a full in-person interview. Yes. Right. I hear a lot of folks say those five people, you owe them a conversation. I actually think you owe, you owe personal feedback on the disposition to the 20 you screened. Right. So, so, so different folks play, but like those five that you, that you asked them to spend four or six hours with your company. Sure.

[00:26:19] You probably owe them a phone call, right? Oh my gosh. How many, how many of those horror stories have we heard where someone said, yeah, I went through six interviews, didn't get the job and they just, I just got the no thanks, no thanks email. You're like, what? Right. How could you ever do that? So when we talk about like ghosting, we talk about people feeling really bad. A portion of it is the folks who are in the 800 who applied and never heard anything. And they're like, yeah, man, like I applied to a hundred jobs and I only heard from 20% of them. And like,

[00:26:47] that feels bad. The like, no, no, no. I got through, I did six hours of interviews and then heard nothing and then got a forum email. And the company would say, oh, we sent the rejection email. We didn't ghost them. It's like, yeah, you did. Right. And so they walk away feeling horrific. And like, these are two, there's a couple of different problems in there. By the way, I, I totally don't, um, espouse to this theory that, um, you can't give candidates

[00:27:14] feedback because of legal risk. I think that's good. We've made that up over decades. You know, can I go to a candidate and say, Hey, you didn't get the job cause you're fat. Like, no, I know. Like what moron would do that? Right. But like, if you're actually doing the right things and you're having a great interview process and you're going through the, you know, asking the same questions and standardized interviews, you know, blah, blah, blah. You should be able to go to every candidate and actually say, Hey, here's exactly why this person got the job

[00:27:41] and you didn't. Yeah. And there's nothing, there's no legal risk there. The problem is a lot of people don't do all that stuff, right? There's a lot of people who don't have that. You go look at their actual like documentation on why they made the decision they made and there ain't much there. And so if you had to say, Hey, I look at all the people who didn't get the job and look at the documentation of their scorecards and compare it to the person who didn't get hired and try to summarize why they didn't get the job. Hey, I can't find insight where the raw material is not

[00:28:11] there. And I've had legal and I've actually worked with heads of TA that were trying to like set up like standardized, like interviewing, like let's blah, blah, blah. And the legal team was like, we want zero interview notes. Right. Yeah. Everyone's around, we get everyone's around to run into a company who says we want, we want no notes. We want no documentation at all. Cause they see that as more legal risk. You're like, Oh my. Right. And we're like, Hey, why? And so we said, well, one, they're definitely not going to buy our products when they say that. And we said, but like, don't, aren't you nervous about the legal

[00:28:40] risks or whatever? And they're saying, no, no, no. We know that our team is super discriminatory. We know they're making decisions based on totally bad reasons. We don't want that written down. Yeah. Like, okay, I can't help. I know. Yeah. You can't help you. Yeah. Can't help those folks. All right. So let's put a bow on this. Fake jobs are a made up concept by media. I would say there's like 0.0001 is a fake job. Now, the only, the only thing we didn't talk about was evergreen jobs and

[00:29:08] the problematic of evergreen jobs is for those uninitiated within the TA space or candidates that don't know what that means. An evergreen job is for companies that hire, let's say we hire a certain kind of salesperson and we're going to hire a hundred of them a year. So we might hire, you know, 10 a month kind of thing this week. I might not hire that person, or I might not even be interviewing, but we constantly have the job open because we know we're constantly going to be

[00:29:35] hiring somebody like, in fact, we might go weeks, months before we would hire somebody, but we know we're constantly looking for these kinds of skillsets. And so we have this job out there. I think a lot of people feel, a lot of candidates feel, well, that's a fake job. And like, and then the recruiting side, we go, no, because it's so hard to find talent when we need it. We constantly are trying to get out there and find the skillsets so that we can come back to you when we do have that opening and go, yes. And that's one where the stats of how many people have applied are really misleading because that

[00:30:04] might've been over the last five years. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I think my takeaway wouldn't quite be like, ah, it's all fake news. I'm like, there is lots of bad behavior by companies, right? There, there is lots of like gaslight the candidates and say, no, no, none of this bad stuff is happening. It's like, no, no, no, it really is crappy. Before we got on, I said, I told you, I'm like for somebody like a candidate that goes to an interview or goes to first day of employment or whatever, they're a terrible person.

[00:30:30] A recruiter that ghosts a candidate, they're also a terrible person. Like you didn't say that I said that. And I believe truly was, so when someone tries to tell me, it's like, oh, well, these candidates ghost us. And then the kids go, well, these recruiters ghost us. I'm like, both those behaviors are awful behaviors. Neither should happen. But in the reality is also there's, there is a lot of scam and frauds out there from both sides right now. And so we're hearing it from everywhere. We're hearing from candidates who are like, I'm getting all these reach outs from companies and it's not from that company.

[00:30:59] There's a lot of stuff where people get talked into like buying a computer with their own credit card and stuff like, like weird stuff that's going on. I'm like, I feel awful because those are, those are the people that desperately want that job so much that they're, they're willing to spend their own money on some weird codes and gift cards to somebody thinking like it's real. And you're like, oh no. Yeah. And then on the other side, we're hearing, we're hearing companies who are like, yeah, I went through this whole interview process. And we're pretty sure that like the person who interviewed and the person who showed up was on the same day and like, and it was nefarious.

[00:31:28] Like they were trying to steal our data. Like there's all, so there's all this skepticism now in the market from both sides. And you're just like, ah, like I have MTC on both sides. I don't want to tell anybody that like, it's all fine. You're making it up. I mean, no, no, no. Like there's all sorts of bad stuff happening. It's the question. It's like, how do you find the good companies? How do you stand out? Right. How do you make, make life a little easier? And I do like, I don't think there's any other hiring system on the market right now that's doing

[00:31:54] like kind of the recruiting or like team credentialing that you guys are doing with your badges. Right. It says like, Hey, this isn't based on them. Oh yeah. We checked the box and we'll do that John, but they don't do it. It's based on their data, right? It's hard data that either you're doing this or not, and you're going to earn this. I think it's a big deal. I think it's bigger than what people think because you're saying, look, I can go to these 7,500 plus like greenhouse customers and know which ones are actually doing the real thing. And you know,

[00:32:22] when we both know how hard it is to do the real, the right thing. That's right. And so, and so we're, we're going to make a big push to our customers to get as many people turn it on as possible and opt into all of these things. Cause we just think it's such a win for them. They're all generally talk to them. They're like, yeah, I want to show off that we're trying really hard and we're, we're doing well. And it's, it's, um, it's more under their control than say class door, which everybody's like, ah, class door can be useful, but it might be like 1% of

[00:32:47] people who ever fill it out. And so the idea of, no, I get to actually show that like, we're trying really hard to treat candidates well. It also creates some like internal incentives inside the company to say, Hey, don't ghost people. Cause you're going to cost us this verification back. That's the behavior we're trying to create. John, I want to end with this and try to help candidates. So a candidate, like we know it's difficult out there right now. You, you made that perfectly clear in the wall street journal

[00:33:13] article. What advice do you have to them when they feel like they're being ghosted, but they really want to job at the company? What can they do? I think I have two pieces of advice I'm giving to folks right now. One is the truth is there is a set of pre-qualified candidates who jumped to the front of the line and internal people who already work at the company are one of those referrals. Are they on another one of those folks referred by actually a staffing agency because the company, like,

[00:33:43] because they're pre-qualifying them. A lot of hires come out of those buckets, right? That may not be fair, right? Cause not everybody has the same networks, but that is the reality of what happens. So if you can network around informational interview, it may not be your best friend, but it's a friend of a friend. Somebody can refer you in and say, Hey, I met this person that helps, right? Put yourself in the recruiter shoes. They're looking for any excuse to not read a thousand resonates. And so they have that extra signal. They will.

[00:34:10] So I think that is a thing to do. The other thing is just like emotional advice is I think people take it really personally as we started with, like you apply, you're like, I think I'm great for this job. Nothing happens. You're like, wow, they don't think I'm great. And you start doubting yourself. No, it has nothing to do with you. It's not about you. It's not. And like, I know it's ridiculous. Not about you. It's what's happening inside of that company. Don't take it personally. It doesn't help.

[00:34:38] That's so good. I want to ask you realistically, and I know this is going to be a ballpark number. How many people reach out to you that are U of M grads looking in network on an annualized basis? Realistically. Honestly, not many, right? Not many. No. And that's to me, that's the shocking part. It's such a great, it's one, if you have a U of

[00:35:08] M grad. I'm like, yeah, I'm like, yeah. And yet I have people reach out to me and I'm like, and they'll say, oh my gosh, I want to get in this company. And they're like a U of M grad. I'm like, and I'll quickly get on LinkedIn and go, you know, there's 75 other U of M grads at that company. Why have you not sent them a note to connect and say, hey, I really want to come work here. You're more likely to help your alumni than anybody else. God help you if you're at Ohio State. Right? Oh, no one's getting out. Do they have alumni? No, I'm just.

[00:35:38] So, but like, to me, that's the crazy part is like the lack of networking for purpose. We both get this like on LinkedIn too, when someone loses a job immediately, all of a sudden you get the message on LinkedIn when you haven't heard from them in three years. You're like, oh, come on. Like, you know, be better than that. But I still think leveraging your network, if you're getting ghosted by a company, six degrees of Kevin Bacon, there's some way that you know somebody or somebody you know knows somebody in that company and work that angle,

[00:36:08] right? Work that angle in terms of trying to figure that out. Yeah. I mean, I think that's like, if you realize the perspective of that recruiter and that they're not sitting there being like, oh, if somebody can and its life is so easy, like they're utterly overwhelmed. Yeah. And so like make their life easier by somebody inside the company being like, hey, check out my friend Sally, you know? So much easier. John, thank you so much. I love that you just tell it exactly like it is. And you don't know how hard that is to get people to talk that way.

[00:36:38] Okay. I hope I'm not going to get in trouble for being so honest. No, I don't. I mean, I don't think there's one thing, right? I think it's exactly... I think you're very open with it's so hard to be a candidate, so hard to be a recruiter. And again, we're trying to figure out how to make this all better, you know? So... And honestly, like internally here, like we're really excited about the stuff we're launching because we just feel like it's so bad out there on both sides. And we think we have a bunch of ideas that could be really impactful and helpful. And so we're psyched that what's going to happen in the next couple of months.

[00:37:06] Awesome. Thank you so much. You guys can check them out on LinkedIn, John Strauss. Check out Greenhouse at greenhouse.io. Again, one of the top ATSs in the marketplace. And again, it's led by someone that's willing to really understand the marketplace in a different way. So John, thank you so much. Thanks, man.