It’s a well-known fact that the job mar­ket is in dis­ar­ray right now. Just how bad it is varies from per­son to per­son, but the gen­er­al con­sen­sus is that it takes hun­dreds of appli­ca­tions to even get an ini­tial inter­view. And if you’re lucky enough to get a sec­ond inter­view, don’t hold out hope because you might get ghost­ed.

One woman thought that she had final­ly reached the end of her long job-search jour­ney, only to have a promis­ing com­pa­ny ghost her.

After months of looking, a woman thought she had found the perfect job.

Tik­Tok con­tent cre­ator Mor­gan Von Feldt shared a video detail­ing her dif­fi­cult job hunt and how she final­ly thought she found the per­fect role.

“I have been apply­ing for jobs for about eight months,” she said.

“I’ve done the hir­ing process before, but I have nev­er seen it as hor­ri­ble as it is right now,” she explained. “It’s just mind-blow­ing.”

But, there was “one spe­cif­ic expe­ri­ence” that Von Feldt real­ly want­ed to dis­cuss with her 26,300 fol­low­ers.

“So back in the begin­ning of May of this year, I applied for a job that I was real­ly, real­ly, real­ly excit­ed for,” she shared.

“They sent me an email and asked me to fill out, like, a cou­ple of ques­tions over email, um, about the job and my expe­ri­ence and every­thing,” she con­tin­ued. “I did that, and I sent the email back, and then prob­a­bly, like, a week lat­er, I heard from them again, and they want­ed to inter­view me. And so my first inter­view with them was on June 11.”

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Little did the woman know that her initial contact with the company would begin a long process of back-and-forth communication that went nowhere.

“And they did a few days lat­er ask me to set up a sec­ond inter­view, which would be a project-based one because it was a graph­ic design posi­tion,” she said. “And so that was prob­a­bly the next week.

Von Feldt said she did anoth­er project-based inter­view after the first one. Every­thing seemed to be going well, but then she went a longer peri­od with­out hear­ing from the com­pa­ny. After about a month, they final­ly got back in touch.

“They emailed me and they said that the posi­tion that I orig­i­nal­ly applied for and had been inter­view­ing for, they were, like, no longer mov­ing for­ward with it at all,” she stat­ed. “No one was get­ting hired for that posi­tion ’cause it was­n’t gonna exist.”

The com­pa­ny was­n’t done with Von Feldt, though. “They said that they want­ed to offer me, like, a con­tract posi­tion, which for graph­ic design, that would look like sort of a project-based type thing,” she explained.

Von Feldt was dis­ap­point­ed the role was­n’t more “con­sis­tent” but was still ready to take it on.

“It was offered to me, this con­tract posi­tion,” she said. “Um, their HR per­son was on vaca­tion or some­thing that week, but I would get a con­tract for this posi­tion the fol­low­ing week.”

“That did not hap­pen,” she stat­ed. “That was August 16. Today was Octo­ber 24, and I don’t have a con­tract. In fact, I have not received any com­mu­ni­ca­tion what­so­ev­er since August 16.”

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It sounds like the woman got duped into applying for a ‘ghost job.’

Sev­er­al com­menters on her video point­ed out that Von Feldt seemed to be deal­ing with a com­pa­ny that post­ed what’s known as a ghost job.

Resume Genius’ senior con­tent man­ag­er and hir­ing man­ag­er, Geof­frey Scott, explained what ghost jobs are to CNBC.

“Ghost jobs are actu­al­ly not scams,” he said. “They’re from real com­pa­nies, but they are open­ings that don’t actu­al­ly exist. That com­pa­ny is not actu­al­ly hir­ing for that role at this moment in time. They might be inter­est­ed in hir­ing for that role in the future, or maybe they were hir­ing for it, but due to bud­get cuts, those roles were closed or put on hold.”

Ghost jobs are com­pli­cat­ed because they aren’t tech­ni­cal­ly fraud­u­lent. 

A com­pa­ny can’t real­ly get in trou­ble for post­ing them. But, they still do a major dis­ser­vice to the appli­cants, who believe these are roles they have a real shot at.

These fake list­ings also inflate the job mar­ket, mak­ing it seem bet­ter than it is, and in the case of Von Feldt, she wast­ed months of time on an inter­view process that could have been spent in con­tact with a com­pa­ny that actu­al­ly want­ed to hire her.

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Mary-Faith Mar­tinez is a writer with a bach­e­lor’s degree in Eng­lish and Jour­nal­ism who cov­ers news, psy­chol­o­gy, lifestyle, and human inter­est top­ics.