Ghost Jobs and Robot Screeners: The View From the Other Side of the Desk

A new survey captures a job market frustrating everyone in it at once. Employers cannot fill roles, and the candidates they are trying to reach increasingly suspect the whole process is a machine talking to itself.

The Canadian labour market is recovering, but you would not know it from how it feels to the people inside it. A survey released August 12 by Express Employment Professionals, conducted with The Harris Poll, captures a job market that has managed the unusual feat of frustrating both sides of the hiring table simultaneously. Employers cannot fill their openings. Job seekers increasingly believe those openings are not real. Both are right often enough to matter.

The employer side of the picture will be familiar to anyone reading the recent data. Nearly a third of Canadian hiring managers, 32 percent, report open positions they cannot fill, up from 29 percent in the fall of 2025. Almost one in five open roles closes without a hire, and 28 percent of managers say hiring now takes longer than it did two years ago. The candidate exists, in theory. Finding, screening, and closing them has simply become slower and harder.

The candidate's grievance

What makes this survey worth a staffing firm's attention is the other half, the job seeker's account of the same market, which is where the more uncomfortable findings sit. More than a third of job seekers, 35 percent, say they struggle with automated hiring systems in place of any human interaction. Nearly a third, 32 percent, suspect that companies are collecting resumes with no genuine intention to hire, the phenomenon the market has started calling ghost jobs. A quarter, 25 percent, worry that AI is eliminating opportunities outright.

These are not complaints about a tight market or a slow economy. They are complaints about the machinery of hiring itself, about a process that has become so automated and so opaque that candidates can no longer tell whether there is a person, or a job, on the other end. When a third of your applicants suspect the posting is a fiction and a third more feel they are shouting into an automated void, the problem is no longer supply and demand. It is trust.

Where this intersects the automation story

For the staffing industry, this survey lands directly on top of a theme that has run through much of this year's news. The large staffing groups have been automating aggressively, compressing time-to-fill with AI agents and pushing a growing share of candidate interactions outside human working hours. Ontario has begun requiring employers to disclose when AI is used to screen applicants. And now the candidate side data puts a number on the cost of getting that automation wrong: a market where a large minority of job seekers actively distrust the process they are being asked to enter.