Behind the polished job advertisements crowding Ghana's newspapers and news sites lies a quieter, more cynical machine — one that exists not to hire, but to be seen to have tried.
Behind the polished job advertisements crowding Ghana’s newspapers and news sites lies a quieter, more cynical machine — one that exists not to hire, but to be seen to have tried.
You have felt it before. The advertisement reads as if it were written for you; the qualifications, the experience, the tone of the role; as though someone had studied your CV before drafting the job description. You apply. You wait. You refresh your inbox the way a farmer studies the sky in a dry season.
And then: nothing. Not a rejection. Not an acknowledgment. Just silence, stretching into weeks, then months, then a quiet understanding that the silence itself is the answer.
In Ghana, this is not misfortune. It is design.
Talk to enough job seekers; the fresh graduate, the mid-career professional, the returnee with a foreign degree and a folder full of certificates and a pattern emerges with the regularity of a national ritual.
Adverts appear in the newspapers and on recruitment sites, dressed in the full formal language of merit: “equal opportunity employer,” “only shortlisted candidates will be contacted,” “apply before the deadline.” The language promises a fair contest. The outcome, more often than the country cares to admit, was decided before the advert ever went to print.
A Ritual of Appearances
Ghana’s procurement law offers an unflattering mirror for what happens in recruitment. Just as public contracts are sometimes advertised only to satisfy a legal requirement; the winner already chosen the bidding process a formality staged for the record; so too are many job vacancies.
The advertisement is not an invitation. It is an alibi. It exists so that, if ever questioned, an institution can point to the newspaper clipping and say: we advertised. We followed the process. The fact that no outsider ever stood a real chance is beside the point; the appearance of fairness has been manufactured, and that is all the exercise was designed to produce.
“It was impossible to secure employment there without the right connections. You had to know someone who knew someone who knew someone.”
Consider the case of a once prominent, privately owned Ghanaian bank – a household name until its collapse in 2019. Long before the crisis that ended it, friends inside the institution, people with no reason to lie, described a workplace where merit was theatre and connections were currency.
One expatriate employee, who resigned before the walls came down, put it more bluntly still: the bank was thriving on cronyism. And yet, month after month, its middle- and top-level positions appeared in the Ghanaian press, complete with deadlines and application instructions, as though the outcome were genuinely in question.
Apply, and you would learn otherwise. Not through a rejection letter, those rarely came, but through the silence that has become its own genre of Ghanaian correspondence.
The Email that Bounced
Sometimes the theatre is not even convincing enough to hide its own seams. A major Ghanaian company once advertised a set of top-level positions, directing applicants to submit their materials through a stated email address. Among those applicants was this writer, whose profile fit one of the vacancies closely enough to justify the effort of applying.
The application pack was assembled, checked, and sent. It bounced. It was sent again. It bounced again. Every attempt returned, undelivered, as if the position existed only in the advertisement and nowhere else.
A contact inside the company eventually made a call on the applicant’s behalf, reaching the human resource department directly. The explanation offered was almost disarming in its casualness: the email address had contained an error; the company would readvertise with the correct one; interested applicants could try again.
And with that, the matter closed. No readvertisement followed. No correction was published. The vacancy simply evaporated, having done whatever quiet work it was placed there to do.
Who is Really Being Hired?
It is worth asking the question more Ghanaians ask only in private: how do the country’s major corporations actually source their staff? Not through the recruitment agencies and human resource consultancies that exist precisely for this purpose; most vacancies, tellingly, never reach them. Not through the open, searchable channels the adverts imply.
The honest answer, uncomfortable as it is, is that a great many positions in Ghana are filled the way they have always been filled: through relationships, referrals, and the informal architecture of who-knows-whom that predates any advertisement and will outlast it.
The public notice, in this arrangement, is not a search. It is a formality, a piece of institutional theatre performed for regulators, for boards, for the appearance of due process, and, not least, for a labour market hungry enough to keep applying regardless of the odds.
A Country’s Quiet Complicity
None of this is a secret. It is, if anything, an open secret – the kind everyone half-knows and no one is required to admit. Job seekers whisper about it in queues and WhatsApp groups. Human resource officers acknowledge it, off the record, with the resigned shrug of people executing a script written above their pay grade. Employers rarely deny it outright; they simply decline to discuss it.
What is missing is the discomfort that should accompany an open secret this corrosive. Every fake vacancy is a small tax on hope, levied against people who can least afford it, young graduates burning through printing money and transport fares to chase openings that were never open, professionals sacrificing the goodwill of current employers to pursue opportunities elsewhere that do not, in truth, exist. Multiply that by the scale of Ghana’s job market, and the fake vacancy stops being an inconvenience and becomes something closer to a structural drain on the country’s most valuable resource: the ambition of its young people.
An Overdue Reckoning
To the recruiters and hiring managers who know exactly what they are doing when they place these advertisements: the desperation of Ghana’s young jobseekers is not raw material to be spent on paperwork. If a preferred candidate already awaits behind the scenes, say so, or better still, stop pretending that a public search is underway when it is not.
The dignity of the process matters as much as its outcome, and Ghana’s employers, public and private alike, owe their applicants at least that much honesty.
Until then, the vacancies will keep appearing, polished, plausible, and, for a very particular kind of Ghanaian jobseeker, entirely beside the point.
**Author’s email: **maximus.attah@gmail.com
