A pattern keeps surfacing, and it’s hard to ignore. In conversations with IT professionals—many currently employed, but quietly exploring new opportunities—a troubling trend has emerged. They’ve applied to dozens of roles for which they are clearly qualified and receive nothing in return—not even meaningful rejections, just silence.
This isn’t simply a matter of not advancing as a candidate. Even the most basic responses—automated acknowledgments, generic follow-ups—are often absent or so perfunctory they border on disingenuous. Interviews are rare. The process feels hollow. This rather observable phenomenon isn’t limited to a single platform—it occurs across all of them. It’s hardly necessary to name the usual suspects, because, frankly, it’s everyone.
The pattern becomes even more unsettling when speaking with those impacted by layoffs—former VMware employees following the Broadcom acquisition or Oracle professionals navigating the company’s pivot toward AI infrastructure. These are not junior candidates. These are seasoned professionals with deep experience.
They apply everywhere and hear nothing. That’s not hyperbole. It’s an observable fact. In many cases, after weeks or even months, candidates may receive a form rejection, if they hear back at all. A templated note citing “an abundance of qualified applicants” or a vague shift in hiring direction. But by then, the effort—often an hour or more per application—has long been spent.
It raises an uncomfortable question: How many of these job postings were ever real to begin with? It’s not a stretch to suggest that many were not. So why would companies create job openings that lead nowhere? As we explored throughout our “Six Cities of Silicon Valley” series, Silicon Valley is no longer confined to geography. It is a distributed system of behavior and incentives. In 2026, that system is driven above all by one thing: data collection.
Now consider the caliber of job seekers on the market today: Oracle ACEs and certified masters, VMware vExperts, and Microsoft MVPs. These are professionals with decades of experience and proven track records. Still, they are getting no responses, calls, interviews, and, of course, no jobs. That is the point. Then comes a story that brings the issue into even sharper focus. There’s a nurse with decades of ICU experience and a major medical center in a city that’s facing a well-documented nursing shortage. She can’t get an interview. At some point, you must ask: Are these job openings even real? The answer is becoming increasingly obvious—much of this appears to be little more than a thin veneer for large-scale data collection.
The math simply doesn’t add up. We’re told there’s a talent shortage. That’s the justification behind programs such as H-1B visas. We’re told critical roles are going unfilled and that companies are desperate to hire skilled workers. However, highly qualified candidates—across industries—are met with deafening silence. So, what’s really going on?
- Are companies posting ghost jobs to signal growth?
- Are roles effectively prefilled while applications are collected for compliance?
- Have hiring processes become so automated that strong candidates never reach a human decision maker?
- Are companies chasing a perfect candidate that doesn’t exist?
Or is the entire sham something more deliberate—a cynical, systemic tool designed to harvest data at scale while consuming the time of qualified professionals? Vegas would already have the odds posted in favor of this one. Whatever the explanation, the disconnect is undeniable. And when top-tier professionals can’t even secure a response—let alone a conversation—it’s no longer a candidate problem. It’s a system problem.
Data Is the New Gold Rush
What if we’re looking at this through the wrong lens? What if the goal isn’t actually to hire? What if the real asset being collected … is data? This is the modern gold rush, but the resource isn’t precious minerals or land—it’s data.
Every application is more than a resume. It’s a dataset—one that can be stored, analyzed, and, in some cases, monetized:
- Career history
- Compensation expectations
- Skills and certifications
- Location preferences
- Behavioral patterns
- Personal life situation and intention (possibly the ultimate violation of personal privacy)
Now, multiply that by thousands or millions. That’s not a hiring funnel—that’s a data engine.
Companies can do the following:
- Benchmark salaries in real time
- Map competitor talent pools
- Identify emerging skill trends
- Train AI recruiting models
- Build future pipelines
And in a broader data economy, aggregated talent data can also hold commercial value, whether through insights, partnerships, or downstream platforms. So, here’s the uncomfortable question: How many job postings are fabricated to represent open roles when their true purpose is data collection, not hiring?
Because in an AI-driven world, fresh, real-world candidate data is incredibly valuable even if no one gets hired. Talent is no longer just hired based on the information they provide. It’s modeled, analyzed, and predicted. Job postings are one of the cheapest ways to collect that intelligence at scale.
The Side Effect: A Broken Experience
For candidates, this creates a frustrating reality:
- A qualified candidate applies to what appears to be a legitimate role—one that may not even be urgent or real.
- That candidate meets the stated requirements, but any eventual response—if it comes at all—is often patronizing or dismissive.
- The candidate internalizes the silence and assumes personal shortcomings, but in reality, the position may never have existed in the first place.
To be fair, some of these jobs likely are real. But that acknowledgment feels more like a courtesy than a meaningful counterpoint. Because the system appears to be optimized for learning, not hiring.
From Gold Rush to Land Grab
In the original gold rush, most people didn’t strike gold. The real winners sold the tools. Today, data is the gold, and the companies collecting it at scale are positioning themselves to win.
So, when a qualified candidate applies for a job today, it raises a fundamental question: What exactly is being mined? This is no longer theoretical—it’s a real issue now being addressed by the U.S. Congress. And in a rare moment of actual bipartisan agreement, there is a genuine push for a legislative solution. So-called ghost jobs are now under scrutiny in the proposed Truth in Job Advertising Act (TTIJAA), which aims to restore integrity and transparency to the hiring process and has bipartisan sponsors. Are you applying for an opportunity or feeding an AI dataset?