Job seeker calls for ban on ‘ghost’ interviews that harvest data for AI | RNZ

Sitting across from the AI interview agent, Charlie Maclean tried to put her best foot forward, but it was awkward.

“It had specific questions,” she said, but it was nothing like connecting with a potential employer face-to-face.

“It would sort of pick up on a key word or something that you’ve said, [like] ‘Hey, that’s good experience in project management – tell us more about it’.”

Answers were timed, Maclean told RNZ, leaving little room to consider a response.

“You’re not really able to take a second to think mid-sentence because it will just assume that you’re finished and then cut you off and on to the next bit.”

It was a jarring experience, which became more strange after the initially very eager company ghosted her.

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Maclean is now sounding the alarm about companies that post prolifically on sites such as LinkedIn, advertising remote roles with attractive salaries.

After some digging online, she fears the company that sent an AI agent to interview her was simply after her personal data to train artificial intelligence – a potential scam or so-called “ghost” job, a scenario where a company advertises for a role it has no intention of filling.

The experience has prompted Maclean to launch a petition to Parliament explicitly banning such job advertisements.

Senior lecturer in organisational psychology at Victoria University Ben Walker doesn’t have “case-closed” evidence of phantom job listings but feels there is enough online commentary to suggest advertised roles by certain companies were spurious.

Companies under fire in online message threads for suspected data harvesting have not responded to RNZ’s requests for comment.

While recruiters RNZ contacted had not come across ghost jobs in New Zealand, they had heard of such practices.

One recruiter, with almost 20 years experience, said companies posting fake jobs to harvest candidate data was a new con for the industry and had been a topic of discussion among colleagues overseas.

Chief executive of Tribe Group recruitment agency Bruce Pilbrow found the scenario plausible, and said it would be an effective way to gather core information.

“There’s a lot happening in the AI space and the online space in the sense of harvesting information,” he said. “Data is king.”

Fake job listing or not, Victoria University senior lecturer in artificial intelligence Andrew Lensen said there was growing concern about where personal information ended up.

CVs and cover letters contained potentially valuable data, he said, including a person’s name, educational background and even an address.

“It’s your career history, it’s what you’ve learned, the skills you have, and we often don’t think about it that carefully but that is a lot of information.

“If it is going into any sort of database or system that could be used for things like AI in the future, then I think people are quite rightfully getting more and more concerned about how the data is being used and where it’s going.”

In her months-long search for work, Maclean said she came across a handful of companies on LinkedIn – a professional networking platform – advertising remote jobs with inflated salaries that seemed to “go nowhere”.

According to Walker, an intense recruitment drive could be a red flag.

“Where it’s a company that you’ve never heard of suddenly doing those sorts of things, it potentially raises a few question marks and alarm bells about whether the jobs are legitimate or whether they may be a cover or some means to another end.”

As a global platform, LinkedIn differed greatly from job sites such as SEEK and Trade Me, he said, and in his opinion it had undergone a transformation in recent years: “People talk about the slopification of LinkedIn.”

In response to questions from RNZ, a LinkedIn spokesperson said the company was investing in free verifications for jobs, recruiters and company pages, and that every job must be authentic and accurately represented.

Neither SEEK nor Trade Me considered ghost jobs to be a material issue on their sites, citing the financial commitment to advertise a role, verification processes, and the ability for job seekers to report suspect listings.

Maclean has since found work but the process was demoralising to the point that she almost forgot what she was good at.

“Jobs that I was really keen on I even took to sending people cupcakes with a little QR code in the icing, literally just to cut through the noise to get a phone call.”

The exhausting process, in addition to her experience with the suspect company, has prompted a petition to Parliament to see ghost jobs explicitly banned, in line with crackdowns overseas.

“It’s incredibly difficult out there.

“I can’t fix that for people but this seems like a really easy one … at least the things that you do put the effort in [for] should be real.”