How racial hiring is coming to define Canada

[I am Groot]

Under the direction of the Liberals, racial hiring quotas are rampant throughout the public sector and spreading into the private sector, especially in companies that have to deal with the federal government. The government doesn't care if you're competent, just so you're not white. Or worse, white and male.

Interesting to note the CBC bragging that only 1.5% of the people they've hired in the last year are white.

 

https://archive.is/r1zVk

[Reg Volk]

Just when you think the CBC can't suck any harder, they suck even harder.

[Goddess]

This is true.

Before I moved in Nov, I was thinking of going to MB.  There were hardly any jobs that didn't say Indigenous only or Punjab-speakers only.

A friend of mine in ON, been looking for a job for almost a year.  Applied for a bank job, which she has lots of experience in.  Didn't get it.  Showed up to the bank a couple weeks later, they were training some Paki guy with an accent so thick you could barely understand him.

Very few jobs for whites out there.

[Reg Volk]

This country is so broken, and the Liberals broke it.

[herbie]

Yes, my ex was denied a post at a Historic Park.

As an animator that reenacted every day 1800s native life and explained things to the tourists.
Just because she was so white she burnt in 5 minutes of exposure to sunlight, neither spoke the tongue of that tribe nor knew diddly squat of their customs or history and had curly blonde hair unlike any native of the time.
The should hire completely unqualified people because they're white or that's discrimination. 

[Moonbox]

3 minutes ago, herbie said:

Yes, my ex was denied a post at a Historic Park.

As an animator that reenacted every day 1800s native life and explained things to the tourists.
Just because she was so white she burnt in 5 minutes of exposure to sunlight, neither spoke the tongue of that tribe nor knew diddly squat of their customs or history and had curly blonde hair unlike any native of the time.
The should hire completely unqualified people because they're white or that's discrimination. 

So you're saying that the people taking jobs should be able to properly speak the language of the population they're meant to service?

You should tell the CRA.  I call the french line so that I don't have to deal with the brown person on the other line that can barely speak english. 

[herbie]

No, I'm saying don't stoop to blackface to fill a position. Not speaking the tongue of the other workers is a minor thing, they all speak English.
We went to Louisbourg and it was sort of silly to be greeted by a blonde lady dresses as a 1700s French soldier. Seeing a wee blonde Scot lassie struggling with a moose hide would be equally as off-putting. So she had to stay playing the spouse of a HBC trader tending chickens and forgo the buck an hour for someone with those specific qualifications.

I found it bad enough that she griped I wasn't affectionate enough when she came home dressed like my Grandma every day, but smelling of moose and smoked salmon would've been the final straw.....

[Goddess]

Not about racial hiring, but I believe this is a problem with finding a job:

Quote

Ghost jobs not only waste applicants' time. They corrupt the data that the federal government uses to measure the economy

Ghost Jobs: The Economy Built on Positions That Don’t Exist

by Peter Girnus

 

2.2 million job postings go nowhere every month. 4 in 10 companies admit the listings are fake. 7 in 10 call it morally acceptable. 85% percent still bring candidates in for interviews.

 

I. The Application

 

The listing looked real. It had a salary range, a team description, a bullet-pointed list of qualifications, and a paragraph about company culture. It had been posted three days ago. It asked for a cover letter.

This is the experience millions of Americans share, and job seeker forums describe in nearly identical terms. You find a posting, read carefully, tailor your resume, write a cover letter, and submit everything through an online portal. The process takes 30 minutes to an hour, sometimes longer for writing samples or portfolios. Then you wait.

The rejection arrives two days later, or two weeks later, or never. The email – if there is one – thanks you for your interest. It wishes you well in your future endeavors. It tells you the company was impressed by your qualifications.

The company did not read your qualifications. In a significant number of cases, the company was never going to. The job was not real. It was a ghost.

“The ghost job economy inflates hope and wastes job seekers’ time,” said Jasmine Escalera, career expert at MyPerfectResume, in a November 2025 report. The report, drawing on Bureau of Labor Statistics data, found that 30 percent of all US job postings never result in a hire. The rate has not moved in four years. It is not a downturn. It is a constant.

The labor market calls these postings ghost jobs. The people who apply to them do not learn that they were ghosts until much later, if they learn at all. Most never find out. They assume they were not qualified. They revise their resumes. They apply to the next one.

Some of those are ghosts, too.

 

II. The Scale

 

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes a monthly report called the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS). In June 2025, it counted 7.4 million job openings across the United States. The same report counted 5.2 million hires.

The difference is 2.2 million. That is 2.2 million reported job openings that did not result in any hires. Not that month. Not ever. According to MyPerfectResume’s analysis, this gap has held between 28 and 32 percent every single month since 2021. Through labor shortages. Through hiring surges. Through layoff waves. The gap does not respond to economic conditions because it is not caused by economic conditions. It is structural.

The ratio of openings to hires peaked at 1.8 to 1 in March 2022 – nearly two posted jobs for every one person hired. By mid-2025, it had declined to about 1.4 to 1. The improvement is modest. The baseline is still broken.

Revelio Labs, a workforce analytics firm, measured the same phenomenon from the employer side. Their data showed that the number of hires per job posting dropped from roughly 0.8 in 2019 to 0.4 by 2024. The conversion rate has halved over the past five years. By October 2024, fewer than half of job postings were filled within six months. In previous years, that figure had been 91 percent.

“What used to be a reliable signal of labor demand has become noise,” said Lisa Simon, chief economist at Revelio Labs. The practice, she said, “softens the signal of what a job posting really means.”

 

III. The Confession

 

In May 2024, ResumeBuilder surveyed 650 hiring managers at companies across the United States. The question was direct: has your company posted a job listing for a role it did not intend to fill?

Forty percent said yes.

Three in 10 said they had a fake listing active at the time they took the survey. Not in the past. Right now. The listing was up. Applications were coming in, but no one was being hired.

The reasons were institutional, not individual. Sixty percent said they posted fake roles to collect resumes – building what the industry calls a “talent pipeline” – with no immediate plan to hire. Others cited investor signaling: open positions on a careers page suggest growth, and growth attracts capital. Others used the applicant data for compensation benchmarking, measuring what candidates said they were willing to accept, and using the numbers to hold wages down internally.

Seventy percent of companies that posted fake listings said the practice had boosted revenue.

The most difficult number in the survey is this one: 85 percent of companies that contacted applicants for fake roles actually brought them in for interviews. These were not passive ghosts. They were active. Companies reached out to candidates, scheduled calls, arranged on-site visits, and conducted interviews for positions that would not be filled. The candidates are prepared. They took time off work. They bought clothes. They rehearsed answers. The process mimicked hiring in every respect except the part where someone gets hired.

Seven in ten of the hiring managers surveyed called this practice “morally acceptable.”

“The word ‘fake’ shouldn’t apply anywhere in the hiring process,” said Stacie Haller, chief career advisor at ResumeBuilder, in an interview with CBS News. “But here we are.”

A separate survey cited by Forbes and LinkedIn, polling 1,641 hiring managers, found similar admission rates. The consistency across samples suggests the 40 percent figure is a floor. Companies willing to confess to posting fake jobs represent the fraction comfortable saying so out loud. The actual rate is almost certainly higher.

 

IV. The Machine

 

Ghost jobs do not persist because of a single bad company or a single reckless recruiter. They persist because every institution in the hiring supply chain profits from them.

Job boards charge per posting. LinkedIn alone lists an estimated 1.7 million jobs in the United States at any given time. If 20 to 40 percent are ghosts – the range multiple analysts have estimated – that represents between 340,000 and 680,000 false listings on a single platform. Each one generates traffic. Traffic generates advertising revenue and premium subscription sales. There is no business model incentive to verify whether a listing corresponds to a real job, because the listing generates the same revenue either way.

Applicant tracking systems – the software that receives, sorts, and filters resumes – sell throughput. How many applications processed, how fast, how cheaply? A system that screens 100,000 resumes for positions that do not exist performs identically, from a software perspective, to one that screens 100,000 resumes for positions that do. The ATS works either way. Its vendor gets paid either way.

A widely repeated claim holds that 75 percent of resumes are rejected by applicant tracking systems before a human ever sees them. The statistic has appeared in Forbes, on LinkedIn, in career-coaching materials, and across hundreds of resume-advice articles. But according to an analysis by the recruitment firm Davron, the number is unverifiable. It traces to Preptel, a defunct resume distribution company that never published its methodology and no longer exists as a business. No peer-reviewed study has confirmed the figure.

What is known is that ATS vendors do not publish their rejection rates. The actual percentage of resumes filtered out before human review is unknown. The 75 percent figure is not a fact. It is folklore – repeated so often that it has acquired the weight of one. It may be approximately right, or wildly wrong. No one outside the ATS industry can say, because the ATS industry does not disclose.

What is measurable is the output of the overall system: employers report 7.4 million openings. They make 5.2 million hires. The rest disappears into a pipeline that processes applications, sends rejections, and produces no jobs.

Recruiters call this pipeline “passive sourcing.” The Society for Human Resource Management publishes guidelines on “talent pipeline development.” LinkedIn Recruiter sells tools designed to build and maintain candidate pools. The language is strategic. The strategy is funded. The funding is justified at quarterly reviews. At no point does the chain require a hire. It requires a metric. Volume is a metric. Engagement is not.

 

V. The Geography

 

The ghost rate is not evenly distributed. It follows a pattern, and the pattern tells a story about which industries treat job postings as commitments and which treat them as advertisements.

Forbes, analyzing BLS data by sector, found that government agencies posted the highest ghost rate: 60 percent. Six in ten federal job postings resulted in no hire. Government agencies are often required by law to post positions publicly, even when an internal candidate has already been selected, or the role is frozen pending budget approval that may never come. The posting satisfies a procedural requirement. The procedure does not require hiring anyone.

Education and health services followed at 50 percent. The information sector – technology, media, telecommunications – posted a 48 percent ghost rate. Financial activities accounted for 44 percent.

At the other end, construction and hospitality showed near-zero or negative ghost rates. In those sectors, more people were hired than positions posted. The dividing line is physical. Industries where the work is tangible and the need is immediate, fill what they post. Industries where the work is abstract, the timelines are long, and the metrics are flexible, post what they may never fill.

The highest ghost rates correspond to sectors with the most complex hiring processes, the longest interview cycles, and the most approval layers. The bureaucracy is not a side effect. It is the mechanism. The more steps between posting and hiring, the more places a ghost can hide.

 

VI. The Distortion

 

Ghost jobs not only waste applicants' time. They corrupt the data that the federal government uses to measure the economy.

JOLTS – the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey – is the primary tool the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses to gauge labor demand. It counts what employers report. It has no mechanism to distinguish between a genuine opening and a ghost. If a company reports 500 openings and fills 34, the BLS records 500. The 466 that went nowhere were included in the data set. They appear in economic reports, in analyst briefings, in headlines.

In March 2022, JOLTS showed job openings above 11 million while hires hovered between 6 and 7 million. The phantom gap hit 38 percent. Economists cited the number as evidence of a historically tight labor market. The Federal Reserve used the opening figure in monetary policy deliberations. Interest rate decisions were made – decisions that affected mortgage rates, consumer credit, and business lending across the entire economy – calibrated in part to a number that included millions of positions no one intended to fill.

“The rise of ghost jobs is muddying the jobs report,” said Dan Kaplan, a senior client partner at the recruiting firm Korn Ferry. “The data tells us there are far more openings than workers. But a significant chunk of those openings don’t represent actual demand.”

The distortion runs in one direction. Ghost jobs inflate the count of openings. They do not inflate the hire count. The result is a federal measure that systematically overstates the number of jobs available and understates how difficult it is to get one. Every month. By millions. The headlines that follow – “labor market resilient,” “strong job growth,” “more openings than workers” – are built on a foundation that includes positions that were never real.

The labor market is being measured with a broken instrument. The instrument is not broken by accident. It is broken by the aggregate behavior of employers who report what benefits them, and a statistical system that has no way to check.

 

VII. The Cost

 

The cost of ghost jobs is paid in a currency that does not appear on any balance sheet. It is paid on time.

Industry estimates place the average time to complete a single tailored job application at 30 to 60 minutes. For roles requiring cover letters, portfolios, or assessment tests, the number is higher. A job seeker who submits 40 applications in a month – a common number in online forums – has spent between 20 and 40 hours on the process. If 30 percent of those listings are ghosts, between 6 and 12 of those hours were donated to companies that were never going to hire anyone.

Scale that across the labor force. The BLS counts millions of unfilled openings per month. Behind each one, some number of applicants – ten, fifty, five hundred – submitted materials. Each application represents a person making a decision about how to spend their time. In aggregate, ghost jobs absorb hundreds of thousands of hours of human effort per month. Time that could have been spent on real applications, on skill development, on rest.

The 85 percent interview rate makes it worse. These are not passive ghosts that simply collect resumes and go quiet. Companies actively reached out to candidates. Scheduled phone screens. Arranged panel interviews. Flew people to offices. The candidates prepared as if the opportunity were real. In every observable respect, it was real. The posting was real. The recruiter’s email was real. The interview questions were real. Only the job was not.

The psychological damage compounds over months. Job seekers in forums and on social media describe the same progression: optimism, then confusion, then self-doubt, then resignation. They stop trusting postings. They stop investing in applications. They assume the worst about every listing, which means they disengage from the legitimate ones, too. The ghost economy not only wastes applicants' time. It poisons the well for employers who are actually hiring.

A petition on

Change.org

calling for the regulation of ghost jobs has gathered more than 50,000 signatures. It does not name a specific company. It is addressed to the economy.

 

VIII. The Silence

 

There is one proposed federal law. It is called the Truth in Job Advertising and Accountability Act. It would require companies to disclose whether a job posting corresponds to a funded, open position and to remove listings within a set period after a role is filled or canceled. A Congressional Research Service report found the bill legally viable.

It has not passed.

Some states have introduced salary transparency requirements in job postings, which is an adjacent issue but not the same one. Knowing a ghost job's salary does not make it any less of a ghost.

The enforcement problem is simple and decisive. Proving that a company posted a job it never intended to fill requires internal communications, budget documents, hiring plans, and records of ATS configuration. The company possesses all of this. The applicant possesses none of it. The asymmetry is total. The company knows the job is fake at the moment of posting. The applicant may never learn it. And the company has no obligation to tell them.

No federal agency audits job postings for authenticity. No platform verifies them. No industry body certifies them. The hiring pipeline operates on an honor system, yet four in ten participants have admitted, on the record, that they do not honor it.

 

IX. The Pipeline

 

There is a phrase that recurs in the language of recruiters, HR departments, and workforce strategy documents. It appears in SHRM guidelines, in LinkedIn product marketing, and in the quarterly presentations that talent acquisition teams deliver to their executives.

The phrase is “talent pipeline.”

A pipeline, in industrial usage, is infrastructure built to move a resource from one place to another. Oil from a well to a refinery. Water from a reservoir to a city. The pipeline has a source and a destination. The resource enters at one end and exits at the other. That is what makes it a pipeline.

The talent pipeline of the ghost job economy has a source. Millions of applicants enter it every month. They submit resumes, write cover letters, complete assessments, and attend interviews. The pipeline receives them. It processes them. It sorts, screens, and sends automated responses.

It does not have a destination.

The resumes are collected. The salary expectations are benchmarked. The data is presented. The slides are approved. The stock price reflects healthy applicant volume. And the applicant – the person who entered the pipeline believing it led to a job – is still inside it, waiting for an outcome that was never part of the design.

In June 2025, 7.4 million openings were reported. 5.2 million hires were made. The remaining 2.2 million were processed, cataloged, and presented as evidence of a healthy labor market.

The pipeline was never meant to flow.

It was only ever meant to fill.

[I am Groot]

Obtained from a 1708 page ATIP disclosure of public service DEI training.

 

Note how it defines racists. Specifically, if a person "does not work to reduce harm to racialized persons" then that person is a RACIST. Also, if you believe in equality, but not equity, you're a RACIST.

This is your government, folks.

 

[I am Groot]

Note that 'equity' is simply creating equality! How can that be bad!? 

Equality between those who are very good at their job and those who are not very good at their job is surely a desirable thing in hiring and promotion! Employment equity means employers must eliminate barriers to various minority groups like, uhm, competence. Being able to communicate in English. Things like that...

 

Edited March 10 by I am Groot

[I am Groot]

CBSA is so desperate to have a more 'diverse' workforce, it's not just discriminating against white men, nor just against white people, but against CANADIANS. It's so desperate to hire brown people that it's willing to hire agents who aren't even Canadians, nor even permanent residents. The guy here on a foreign worker permit at Tim Hortons is welcome to apply, as are the foreign students.

Funny, I haven't noticed a lack of 'diversity' among CBSA people at Canadian airports. Has anyone else gone to the airport lately and thought, "Boy, where did all these Scandinavian employees come from!?" 

 

[CDN1]

On 3/9/2026 at 4:12 PM, herbie said:

Yes, my ex was denied a post at a Historic Park.

As an animator that reenacted every day 1800s native life and explained things to the tourists.
Just because she was so white she burnt in 5 minutes of exposure to sunlight, neither spoke the tongue of that tribe nor knew diddly squat of their customs or history and had curly blonde hair unlike any native of the time.
The should hire completely unqualified people because they're white or that's discrimination. 

You really are a pathetic piece of shit.