Five Thousand Nos

A field report from the collapsed corporate ladder — and the ghost economy that replaced it.

I just closed out another application cycle. A company with more than two hundred open positions. Not one of them for me. Add it to the pile.

Seven years. Five thousand-plus applications. One verdict.

I used to believe what we’re all told to believe: the market is a meritocracy, effort compounds, the cream rises. I don’t anymore. Not because I stopped trying — I never stopped trying — but because the evidence has piled up into something I can no longer pretend isn’t there.

Let me walk you through what the data actually says about the system that has been telling me “no” for the better part of a decade.

The Ghost Job Economy

Somewhere between 18 and 22 percent of all online job postings in 2025 are ghost jobs — listings with no intent to hire — according to a Greenhouse study cited across industry reporting this year. On LinkedIn specifically, an analysis by ResumeUp.AI puts the figure at roughly 27 percent. In Los Angeles, it climbs above 30. Nearly one in three postings in some cities is a complete fiction.

Zoom out to the federal data and the picture worsens. In June 2025, employers reported 7.4 million openings to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and made only 5.2 million hires. That is 2.2 million listings that vanished into the void in a single month. The gap between openings and actual hires has held steady between 28 and 38 percent since 2021.

Here is the number that got me: in a March 2025 LiveCareer survey of HR professionals, 45 percent admitted they “regularly” post ghost jobs, and another 48 percent said they post them occasionally. That is 93 percent of the profession, by its own admission, running a soft fraud on the people who are trying to work.

Fast Company’s recruiter survey put the figure at 81 percent of recruiters having posted a ghost job. A Clarify Capital study found that nearly one in three employers admit to posting listings they have no intention of filling in the short term.

Translate that for anyone still laboring under the illusion of a functioning labor market: when you spend a weekend polishing a resume, writing a tailored cover letter, and customizing your portfolio for a specific opening, the odds that the opening is real are, in the most generous reading, about two-in-three. In some cities, closer to one-in-two. And nobody tells you which is which.

That is the system. It is not broken. It is working exactly as designed for the people running it. The only ones it is broken for are the applicants — and we are treated as an externality.

The Algorithm Doesn’t Like Your Birthday

I am thirty-eight. Technically not yet old enough to invoke federal age-discrimination protections, which begin at forty. But the algorithms do not wait for my birthday.

AARP testified before the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging in September 2025 that AI-driven resume screeners use graduation dates and years of experience as proxies for age, filtering older applicants out before any human sees the file. Two-thirds of workers over fifty report having seen or experienced age discrimination on the job. In an August 2024 CWI Labs survey of 1,600 adults over fifty, 59 percent said their age had created obstacles in their job search.

Meanwhile, corporate jobs in 2025 are down roughly 3.5 percent from 2021. Middle-management ranks are being hollowed out. DOGE-related federal layoffs alone account for more than 280,000 job losses this year. The people flooding back into the market are mid-career professionals — the exact demographic the algorithm is trained to flag as expensive, inflexible, or “overqualified.”

States are beginning to notice. New York City, Colorado, and Connecticut now prohibit graduation-date fields on applications for this exact reason: a graduation date is not a qualification. It is an age calculator. And employers have been using it to do what the Age Discrimination in Employment Act forbids them from doing in person.

I am not old. The algorithm and I are, nonetheless, not on speaking terms. And the algorithm is doing the hiring.

The “Didn’t Try Hard Enough” Lie

I am, among other things, a workaholic. I do an enormous amount of work for free, for the satisfaction of organizing projects and building things of use. I have published dozens of books. I run a civic journalism publication. I am mounting a campaign for Governor of this state. I build software. I produce video. I write daily. I ship.

None of it, apparently, counts on a resume screener.

The standard-issue lecture from a certain generational cohort — the one that bought houses on a single income at twenty-four — is that people like me did not grind hard enough, did not network hard enough, did not want it badly enough. The lecture would be insulting if it were not so confused. The ladder they climbed no longer exists. It is not that the rungs are farther apart. Somebody sold the ladder for scrap and is now lecturing the rest of us for not climbing.

I have been maintaining a file. Five thousand rejections. Auto-replies. Silent ghostings. Templated regrets from recruiters who never opened the application. “We have decided to pursue other candidates” for jobs that were never real. “We will keep your resume on file” in a file that does not exist.

I am thinking of publishing it. Bound, indexed, cross-referenced. A monument to the lie.

What a Governor Should Say About This

I am running for Governor of New Hampshire. So let me say the thing most candidates for most offices will not say, because the donor class does not want to hear it:

The American labor market is, in significant part, a simulation. The employment figures are distorted by fake postings. The “skills gap” is frequently a euphemism for “we will not pay for the skills we already have.” The gig economy is a pay cut in yoga-studio vocabulary. The algorithm is discriminating on age at scale and the state is calling it efficiency.

New Hampshire has the tools to lead on this, and they are not radical tools. We can require employers advertising jobs in this state to disclose intent to hire, a salary range, and how long a position has been recycled. We can prohibit graduation-date fields on applications for state-licensed or state-regulated employers, as three states already do. We can put actual enforcement behind the age-discrimination statute at the hiring stage, not just once somebody is already on payroll. We can stop cheerleading “job postings” as a proxy for economic health when a third of them are fiction.

None of that gets done while we keep pretending the system works and the problem is the applicant.

The Punchline

The bitter joke in all of this — and I do find it funny, in the sense that a coyote finds the trap funny after the third time — is that the people who actually know me know I am a workaholic. I produce constantly. I ship constantly. I give work away constantly, for the satisfaction of building something of use to somebody.

Would I hire me at this point? Honestly, no. I would be a pain. I would be critical of everything. I would refuse to pretend the meetings were productive or that the strategy deck made sense or that the CEO was as sharp as his salary implied. I would be a disaster of a hire for a company running on ceremony.

So the algorithm and I have reached a quiet understanding. It does not want me. I do not want it.

What is left is to do the work anyway — for the state, for the people getting the same templated rejection I am, for the next person about to spend a Saturday polishing an application for a job that was filled in April or never existed at all.

Five thousand nos. Monument pending.