It took more than six months of job hunting, a dozen or so interviews, thousands of applications uploaded, but I finally got a job.

I had been trying to get into this local engineering firm for months. The pay was substantially lower than what I was making at my old job, but I knew I’d be taking a pay cut. I wasn’t planning for it to be quite that much of one, but I can manage. The benefits are great, there’s a lot of travel involved, and the job itself seems challenging. I’ll be managing a team of software engineers, which is funny because I’ve never been a software engineer, but apparently it’s the people management skills they wanted. I can learn to be a software engineer if needed.

I’m sure a lot of jobs I applied for were ghost jobs. Still, I had to apply; what if they weren’t? There’s always that chance.

That doesn’t sound very scary. Maybe not as an isolated incident, but a survey has revealed just how widespread the practice is. It’s estimated that a whopping 40% of companies posted a fake job listing this year.

So if I’m applying for a job … It’s quite possible that you’re focusing your time and effort on something that doesn’t exist. Even worse, 85% of companies that contacted applicants regarding their fake jobs say they also fake-interviewed them.

Wow, that really is terrifying. Why do they do it? Spite? Well, there are a variety of factors. Perhaps they are doing it to trick their existing employees into thinking their workload will soon be lightened by a new hire.

Also evil. One other suggestion is that, by flooding employment sites with fake jobs, their real employees will start to see themselves as more replaceable than they are, and choose to work harder for less money so that they can keep their jobs.

Seriously. It’s hard enough to get a job without this bullshit. Plus, everyone is saying “people don’t want to work”; well, when we’re wasting our time applying for ghost jobs, it wears us down and we’re less likely to apply for the real ones, whichever they might be. Job hunting is stressful and exhausting and in many ways demeaning (go on, write a cover letter, otherwise known as fanfic for why you should love the company and job) without this added wrinkle. And, worse, it’s expected these days to not stay at a company for more than a few years, so you have to go through it over and over and over. I don’t know about you, but I like to be loyal to a company that has been loyal to me (by not laying me off). Though given that the only way to get a decent raise these days is to change jobs, it doesn’t surprise me. I’m pretty sure I won’t be in this role for more than a year — two at the outside. Hopefully I’ll get a better job within the company, but who knows?

Anyway. I got a job. Fortunately I got it after I finished writing Holiday Heat, so at least it won’t infringe on that process the way my last job did. And it’s only in-office two-and-a-half days per week, so I should be able to write more. Oh, and the commute is all of fifteen minutes — yes, even in Atlanta traffic — so I should be less stressed about going into the office in the first place, and I should have more time to write since I won’t be driving two hours a day and getting stressed out by traffic.

Jobs are out there. It may not seem like it, but they are. So don’t give up.