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Consultants seeking work are increasingly likely to be chasing ghosts. Job listings for consulting roles with no hiring activity, also known as “ghost jobs,” hit a two-year high, according to data from hiring platform Greenhouse.

While ghost jobs have declined in finance and technology, those in consulting — a bellwether for the white-collar economy — rose to 31% in the second quarter, up from 26% two years ago and well above the prevalence across the broader job market.

The shift is creating a lot of frustrated jobseekers in an industry where the best and brightest historically have had their choice of employers. Consultants have also bemoaned the experience of getting ghosted, a related phenomenon where the recruiter ends all communication during a hiring and interview process without any explanation.

“It can be so awful,” said Michelle Lentz, who’s on the job market after a recent layoff from a boutique consulting firm. Lentz said she has been ghosted multiple times recently — sometimes not hearing back at all, and other times getting to the interview process, only for the recruiter to go silent.

“I don’t care for automated rejection letters, but would prefer that, just to have closure,” she said.

Ebbing demand for traditional consulting services has prompted job cuts and slower hiring at firms like Accenture Plc, Ernst & Young and McKinsey & Co. Uncertainty around the US presidential election and renewed concerns about a looming recession have also cooled a market where lucrative jobs were plentiful just two years ago.

Growth in the US consulting market slowed last year to 5.2%, according to Source Global Research, an industry researcher, down from 14% the previous year, as nearly half of firms that use consultants said they were scaling back, deferring or canceling projects. The researcher forecasts growth of about 6% this year.

Slower Hiring

“When the economy is hot, you have to treat job candidates better and make decisions faster,” said Jon Stross, co-founder and president of Greenhouse, whose customers post an average of about 225,000 jobs a month. “When it flips and there are way too many candidates, it slows down decision making. Recruiters can wait for that perfect person, so they treat people worse and get away with it.”

On a Reddit board popular among consultants, one person complained about applying for more than 500 jobs without finding anything. Another said many roles “have gotten closed or put on hold,” so much so that they’re “no longer being picky.”

Such behavior can be a result of recruiters getting overwhelmed by applicants in today’s slower hiring market, according to Hung Lee, the editor at Recruiting Brainfood, an industry newsletter. Other causes of ghost jobs, Lee has said, include job listings that remain online long after the position has been filled, a sudden hiring freeze, or when an external recruitment agency posts a duplicate of a job that’s already been advertised by the employer.

“They’re not fake ads, just clones representing a real job,” he said. “The effort to create a fake job is not worth the cost to do so.”

Shrinking Salaries

It’s not just job-hunting consultants whose lives are getting tougher, those who are currently employed are also seeing slowing wage growth.

The industry’s salary increases are projected to decline for the third straight year, according to the Conference Board, a business think tank. The survey of compensation managers found that average salary budgets in consulting are set to rise just 3.85% next year, a tick down from this year and more than a full percentage point below the nearly 5% boost in 2023.

Artificial intelligence is driving some of the uncertainty in the consulting job market. Businesses are exploring the new technologies and might not need the full services consultants have to offer anymore.

“With the advent of new AI technology, what companies need is changing, and smaller, more nimble agencies have taken hold,” said Diana Scott, US Human Capital Center leader at the Conference Board. “The consulting industry is being disrupted now.”