I had coffee with a college friend a few months ago who worked at a firm I'd been targeting since being laid off last year. It had been a while since we'd caught up, so I checked his company Web site to see if there were still any positions that I might fit in case he could forward my resume and perhaps earn a referral bonus. It turned out there was one.
It was the same position I'd applied and interviewed for almost one year ago to the day.
I went back and pulled up my notes - yes, I save everything during my job search, much to my wife's occasional complaint about my pack-rat behavior - and sure enough, it wasn't merely an identical position description, it was the exact same one.
At first, I was slightly confused. Had the search been reopened after the initially hired candidate failed to work out for some reason? No, I quickly concluded. If that had been the case, the company would undoubtedly have modified the description at least somewhat. That meant one of two possibilities: a) the company had been unable to fill the position over the past twelve months in a job market teeming with available talent that was desperately looking for work, or b) the job was frozen but still online.
Either way, I was angry. Why had I wasted my time a year ago applying to this place AND going through not one but TWO subsequent interviews if they weren't even going to be filling the job at all?
"We're not hiring anybody right now," my friend confided to me when we got together. "In fact, we're actually downsizing by attrition. But don't tell anybody."
"But then why are you still advertising for open positions if you're in a freeze or cutting?" I asked.
"Beats me," he said. "Probably because we're a publicly traded company, and pulling job descriptions off the Web would send a bad signal to shareholders."
To say I went home dejected that afternoon would be an understatement. How many other times had I done this? Applied to positions that were the job equivalent of the undead? Positions that weren't actually live jobs but which roamed cyberspace forever and lured fresh victims to feed on their frustration? (Yes, I'm stretching the metaphor here, but I had to find something to go with the picture above - I love it because the undead apparently still require corrective eyeware, which I never knew...)
I mentioned this to some recruiters and HR folks, and the answers I got were rather surprising - at least to me and probably anyone outside HR. "Companies do that all the time," one recruiter told me. "They may not be hiring at all, but they want to keep their finger on the pulse of the talent that's available. So they leave job descriptions up online even after something's filled or after it's determined not to be a priority position. That way, they can be assured of a constant pipeline of resumes to help them monitor the talent that's out there, see what the likely salary demands will be, and so on. And whenever someone at the company does leave, they have an immediate pool of applicants and know what it will take to fill a comparable position."
"But why not just say you're looking for people with XYZ skills instead of misleading applicants with what amounts to a fake job position?" I asked.
"Who knows?" the recruiter told me. "Someday they may decide to make it an actual position if they find the right candidate."
"But what if you ARE the right candidate?"
"Then it comes down to a matter of being in the right place at the right time," he told me. "You could be the perfect candidate and have all the right skills and experience, but if you apply at the wrong time - during a freeze, for instance - you won't get hired. But if a new manager comes in and decides that the position is urgent and does finally need to be filled or that the time to unfreeze has come, someone with lesser skills may make the cut if they're there at that moment and you're not. It all comes down to timing."
I went back and looked over several of the jobs I had applied for and cross-checked them against companies' current Web pages. Sure enough, in a number of instances many of the firms I had applied to - and in some instances interviewed with - still had the identical job descriptions posted online. Verbatim. Either they hadn't been able to find someone with the qualifications they were looking for, or the postings had turned into "zombie positions."
My advice? Do whatever you can to learn about a position before bothering to apply. Nothing will frustrate you more than spending a good deal of time crafting a carefully worded resume outlining how you match the various requirements for a position (and then preparing for a subsequent interview or two) only to get rejected and yet still see the exact same position online twelve or thirteen months later.
In other words, learn to watch out for the zombies.
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