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Ghost Jobs, Stealth Layoffs, and Lower Pay
Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
In this week’s episode, Nick and Geoff take a break from AI headlines to dig into three stories that together paint a troubling picture of the current job market. In Texas, LinkedIn is under investigation for ghost job postings. A new survey finds 72% of employees believe return-to-office mandates are stealth layoffs. Lastly, Glassdoor data shows 57% of recently laid-off workers are considering accepting lower pay, with women bearing a disproportionate share of the cuts.
Short on time? Here are the key takeaways:
- Texas has opened a consumer protection investigation against LinkedIn under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act, alleging between one-fifth and one-third of job postings are ghost jobs; Nick proposes a practical fix: require employers to periodically verify postings are still active, automatically removing any that go unconfirmed
- LinkedIn’s new AI slop flag for content is its clearest acknowledgment that platform trust is eroding, but no equivalent tool exists for job postings that would solve for the trust problem
- 72% of employees believe return-to-office mandates are being used as stealth layoffs, with an average trust score of just 59 out of 100 for employer RTO motives—meanwhile, 46% of workers admit to coffee badging, coming in just to swipe a badge before leaving
- Nick draws a clear distinction between employers who always communicated an in-office expectation and those who hired remotely and are now changing the terms (only the latter represents a genuine breach of the employment social contract)
- 57% of recently laid-off workers are considering accepting lower salaries, and pay cuts are disproportionately affecting women, backtracking after three decades of progress on narrowing the gender pay gap in a relatively short period
Episode Summary
LinkedIn’s Ghost Job Problem and What to Do About It
Texas has filed a lawsuit against LinkedIn under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, alleging that a significant portion of the platform’s job listings are ghost jobs: postings that are not connected to active hiring, whether because the role was filled and never removed, was never a real opening to begin with, or was posted to give a false impression of company growth. Estimates cited in reporting around the lawsuit put the share of ghost jobs somewhere between one-fifth and one-third of all LinkedIn postings.
Nick’s take is that the legal merits are hard to evaluate from the outside, partly because the line between a ghost job and an employer who simply forgot to close a posting is genuinely blurry. A company might post a role, hire someone within two weeks, and simply not update the listing. That is not the same as intentionally posting a fake job to inflate perceived market presence, but from a job seeker’s perspective the experience is identical: they apply, hear nothing, and lose time and confidence in the process.
The more useful question, Nick argues, is what LinkedIn could do about it without waiting for a lawsuit to resolve. His proposal is a forced verification system: require employers to confirm every 15 to 30 days that a posting is still active, automatically removing any listing that goes unconfirmed. At the point of closing a role, require employers to indicate whether the position was filled, cancelled, or is on hold. That data would both reduce ghost job volume and give the platform better signal for improving how listings are surfaced.
Geoff notes that LinkedIn has already taken a step in this direction on the content side. The platform recently added a feature allowing users to flag posts as potential AI-generated content, a tacit acknowledgment that trust in platform content is eroding. Nick calls it the most relevant feature LinkedIn has added in years from a user experience perspective, particularly for anyone who has noticed the shift toward longer, lower-value AI-generated posts crowding out genuine professional content. The logic for applying something similar to job postings is straightforward.
Both Nick and Geoff make the point that employers and employees are largely aligned on this issue. Employers do not benefit from ghost jobs diluting the quality of their own listings. They want real candidates to see and apply to genuine openings, not wade through noise. The only employers who benefit from ghost jobs are those intentionally posting them to signal growth or maintain market presence, and those represent a small and problematic subset.
Return to Office, Stealth Layoffs, and a Trust Score of 59 Out of 100
A new survey of a thousand full-time workers produced several data points that, taken together, describe a workforce that has deeply low trust in employer motives around in-office work. Seventy-two percent of respondents believe that return-to-office mandates are being used, at least in part, as stealth layoffs: a mechanism for forcing out employees who will not or cannot comply, without the formal process, severance, and public optics of a traditional reduction in force. The average trust score employees assigned to RTO motives was 59 out of 100.
Nick is careful to distinguish between two different types of employers here. An employer who consistently communicated during the pandemic that in-office work would return, hired on that basis, and is now following through has not breached any social contract. The communication was clear, the expectation was set, and the policy is a delivery on what was stated. An employer who hired people into fully remote roles, made no indication that on-site work would be required, and is now changing the terms mid-employment is a different situation. That is where Nick sees a genuine breach of trust, and where he has more sympathy for employee frustration.
Even for employers acting in good faith, the survey data on coffee badging is a reminder that compliance and genuine engagement are not the same thing. Forty-six percent of workers surveyed admit to coffee badging: physically entering the office to register a badge swipe, then leaving without doing any meaningful in-office work. Geoff frames this as a signal of the limits of mandating presence without making the case for why presence matters. If the only metric is whether someone came in, employees will optimize for that metric rather than for the collaboration or mentorship benefits the policy was designed to create.
Nick’s broader point is about communication. Even in situations where an employer genuinely believes in-person work drives development and innovation, the way that case is made to employees determines whether the policy builds trust or destroys it. Announcing a sudden RTO requirement without explanation will land badly regardless of the underlying intent. Rolling it out transparently, explaining the reasoning, and giving employees time to adjust is not a guarantee of goodwill, but it is meaningfully better than the alternative.
Lower Pay and a Widening Gender Gap
A Glassdoor poll found that 57% of recently laid-off US workers are accepting new jobs at lower salaries than they held previously. For workers who may have already experienced a gap in income during a period of unemployment, often only partially covered by severance or unemployment benefits, taking a pay cut to re-enter the workforce compounds the financial damage.
Nick notes that this pattern is not happening in isolation. It is arriving at the same time as ghost jobs that waste job seekers’ time and erode their confidence, return-to-office mandates that many workers distrust, and a labor market that has shifted decisively toward employer leverage. The cumulative effect is a job market where employees at almost every stage, searching, interviewing, accepting, or staying, have less bargaining power than they did even two or three years ago.
The detail that Nick finds most troubling is the gender dimension. The Glassdoor data indicates that pay cuts are disproportionately affecting women, reversing ground that had been gained over the past three decades in narrowing the gender pay gap. Progress on pay equity has historically been slow and uneven, and the current reversal is happening quickly enough that it is showing up clearly in survey data. Nick frames it as one of several areas where the current economic moment is not just challenging but genuinely regressive, with gains that took years to achieve being unwound in a much shorter period.
Geoff closes with the through line across all three stories: trust. Ghost jobs erode trust in platforms. Stealth layoff theories reflect eroded trust in employer motives. Pay cuts and pay equity reversals reflect eroded trust in the promise that the labor market rewards people fairly over time. The practical implication for HR leaders is that rebuilding that trust requires more than a policy change or a communication memo. It requires consistent behavior over time on all three dimensions simultaneously.
Frequently Asked Questions
Ghost jobs are job postings that are not connected to active hiring, either because the role was already filled and the listing was never removed, the role was never a genuine opening, or the posting was created to give a false impression of company growth. They waste job seekers’ time, inflate application numbers without producing genuine opportunities, and erode trust in job platforms. Texas’s lawsuit against LinkedIn alleges that between one-fifth and one-third of LinkedIn’s job postings fall into this category.
LinkedIn recently added a feature allowing users to flag posts as potentially AI-generated, acknowledging that platform trust is being eroded by low-quality content. No equivalent feature exists yet for job postings. Nick proposes a forced verification system: require employers to confirm every 15 to 30 days that a listing is still active, automatically remove unconfirmed postings, and require employers to report whether the role was filled or closed at the end of a listing’s lifecycle.
The stealth layoff theory holds that some employers are using return-to-office mandates as an indirect way to reduce headcount, forcing out employees who will not or cannot comply without incurring the formal costs and public optics of a traditional layoff. A survey of a thousand full-time workers found that 72% believe RTO mandates are being used this way, at least in part. The average trust score employees assigned to employer motives around RTO was 59 out of 100.
Coffee badging refers to employees physically entering the office to register a badge swipe, then leaving without doing any meaningful in-office work. Forty-six percent of workers surveyed admit to this behavior. It signals a disconnect between mandated presence and genuine engagement, and reflects what happens when employers measure compliance with an in-office policy rather than the outcomes the policy was designed to produce.
Nick’s position is that they can be, and that context matters significantly. An employer who consistently communicated that in-office work would return and hired on that basis has not changed the terms of the employment relationship. An employer who hired people into fully remote roles without indicating an in-office expectation and is now requiring it has a different and harder case to make. In either situation, how the policy is communicated, how much lead time is given, and whether the reasoning is explained transparently determines whether the mandate builds or damages trust.
Glassdoor data indicates that 57% of recently laid-off workers are accepting new jobs at lower salaries. The data further shows that pay cuts are disproportionately affecting women, reversing progress made over the past 30 years in narrowing the gender pay gap. Nick frames this as one of several areas where the current labor market is not just challenging but genuinely regressive, with gains that took decades to accumulate being reversed relatively quickly.
Full Episode Transcript
Nick: Welcome to the Wellable Weekly Podcast, where we talk about key topics and trends at the intersection of wellbeing, technology, and HR. I’m Nick, along with my good friend Geoff. Geoff, it’s a special episode today. I think it’s the first time in weeks, if not months, that we don’t have an AI topic. It’s not because AI wasn’t generating news this week. It’s just because we’re a little AI-tired and want to focus on something else.
Geoff: Let’s give the people what they want.
Nick: At least give us what we want. First topic: LinkedIn. They’re getting sued by the state of Texas for a high volume of ghost jobs. The allegations are that a significant portion of job postings shared on LinkedIn were fake or not valid hiring opportunities, and that this violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. The argument is that many people, especially those paying for a LinkedIn premium account for access to recruitment tools and job postings, are paying for a service that promises access to real job opportunities, and the fact that many of those postings may not exist is a problem. I know nothing about the law, but my general sense is that this is hard to validate. Maybe LinkedIn can verify these are real companies, but a company could post two jobs they’re not serious about filling to signal to the market that they’re growing. I don’t know how LinkedIn can verify whether a job posting is genuine.
Geoff: The article cited that between one-third and one-fifth of LinkedIn job postings are estimated to be ghost jobs. Call it a quarter if you want to pick an average. LinkedIn would likely have a different perspective on that number. What’s probably drawing attention in a lawsuit like this is the perceived volume. LinkedIn is a marketplace providing the ability for employers to post jobs and for candidates to apply. The volume of listings and applications is so high that when people feel like they’re not getting responses, that experience of sending applications into a void compounds and erodes trust in the system. And it is not the only area where LinkedIn is trying to clean up content that isn’t fully genuine. The most recent thing I noticed was that they now have an option to flag posts as potentially AI-generated, what some are calling AI slop. LinkedIn is clearly aware that trust in key parts of its platform is being eroded and is taking proactive steps on the content side. I’m not sure how they’ll respond to the ghost jobs lawsuit, but a similar feature — something like a flag this as a ghost job option — might be a direction they explore.
Nick: The AI slop flag is honestly the biggest feature or most relevant addition LinkedIn has made in years for me as someone who scrolls the platform regularly. Have I flagged anything yet? No, I’m a bad member of the community. But the quality of content I’m getting from LinkedIn has dropped significantly in the last 12 to 24 months. It is so easy for people to generate content now, and a lot of it is AI slop. These posts tend to be longer and deliver less utility. When you write something yourself, time is of the essence and you tend to be more concise.
On the ghost jobs lawsuit specifically, I think a practical and reasonable measure for LinkedIn to pursue would be a forced verification system. If you post a job listing, LinkedIn verifies every 15 to 30 days that the posting is still active. Listings that go unconfirmed get automatically removed. When the position is closed, the employer is required to report whether they hired someone, decided not to hire, or put the role on hold. That would clean up the roster significantly, because some ghost jobs are just accidents where a company hires and forgets to update LinkedIn. Once you clear those out, you have a much cleaner picture of intentional ghost posting.
Both employers and employees are largely aligned here. Employers don’t benefit from ghost jobs diluting their own listings and making it harder to find real candidates. The only employers who benefit from ghost jobs are the ones intentionally posting to overstate their growth or market presence, which is just the wrong thing to do. So I get the frustration on the employee side, and I think there’s a lot of alignment on solutions. But as it exists today, ghost jobs are prevalent, and that is one of the many things making this an extremely difficult job market.
Geoff: And it’s just a whole different market than it was even 12 to 24 months ago. The pendulum has really swung and seemingly stabilized in a more employer-friendly position. The screws are just getting tightened on all facets of the job seeker ecosystem.
Nick: Another thing that came up was new data from a survey of a thousand full-time workers, built around return-to-office mandates. A lot of employees believe — and I don’t think they’re wrong — that some employers are using RTO mandates as a way to lay off people. The term used in the article is the stealth layoff theory, and 72% of employees believe it. I’m not sure it’s always true, but it’s certainly part of the narrative. So now imagine you’re in a job you don’t love, you don’t see advancement, and now your employer is asking you to come in. You know tons of jobs are ghost jobs, you’re likely to accept lower pay. It’s just a really challenging environment.
Geoff: That stat genuinely surprised me. Nearly three-quarters of people thinking RTO is primarily driven by stealth layoff motives. I always assumed there was some portion of the workforce that held that cynical view, but the vast majority thinking that way really shows how low trust has gotten in at least some organizations. The other thing that surprised me in this study was how little value the youngest generation in the workforce assigns to being in office for mentorship purposes. There’s a quote in there: the idea that we need to be present is asinine. Many just come in to socialize and then go home. No more work gets done here than at home. I understand the focus on output, but if that’s all we’re thinking about, we’re being very short-term as an organization. That mindset doesn’t allow for innovation, creativity, or expanding beyond what you’re already doing. It’s a true punch-the-clock mentality.
Nick: To put numbers behind it, 46% of workers admit to coffee badging, which we talked about a couple of months ago. You come in, swipe your badge, get coffee, and leave. If you’re going through the effort of getting dressed and commuting but not staying, you clearly see no value in being there beyond satisfying the badge swipe metric. At some point that’s on the employer to make the case for why being in person matters. The average trust score for RTO motives in this survey was 59 out of 100. Not good. There are also stats about the number of employees using in-office time to look for other jobs, which is high.
The overall theme of this survey is that there’s a belief in a social contract between employers and employees, and that many employees feel the employer is breaching that contract by forcing them back into the office. I would come to the defense of employers in some cases. If you’re an employer who consistently communicated during COVID that you would be back in the office, there’s no breach of contract. You delivered on what you said. But if you hired someone without any indication that in-office work would be required and are now suddenly requiring it, that is a breach. That said, even for employers acting in good faith, the way this gets communicated matters enormously. Roll it out over time, explain the reasoning, address the concerns. Even if you communicate it perfectly, you will have disgruntled employees. But I hope the trust score would be higher and there would be more genuine willingness to make the most of being there.
Geoff: Agreed. And the big takeaway from today is how many opportunities exist to improve trust across so many different facets of the world we operate in — from the micro level of how companies manage their people, to the macro level of rebuilding trust in the application, hiring, and recruiting workflow that HR professionals rely on. With that, let’s wrap up today’s episode. As always, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be sure to subscribe to the Wellable Weekly newsletter for all the latest insights. Thank you.
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