Ghost Jobs Are Real: Here's Why Companies Post Them Anyway
Not every job you’re applying to is real. Some of those listings were never going to get filled by anyone, and the company that posted them knew that going in.
In eight years as a technical recruiter, I sat through more than one headcount conversation where everyone in the room had already quietly agreed a requisition wasn’t moving. The posting stayed up anyway. Nobody called it a ghost job back then. It didn’t need a name to be common practice.
In this guide
I’ll cover what a ghost job actually is and how common it really is, the real reasons companies post listings they don’t intend to fill, and what’s finally starting to change, from crowdsourced tracking tools to a state attorney general’s office getting involved.
The term has a name now, and it’s having a moment for a real reason. ResumeBuilder recently surveyed 1,641 hiring managers, screened for manager-level roles or higher, at least $75,000 in income, working at companies with 10 or more employees. Forty percent said their company posted a fake listing in the past year, a direct admission from the people who did the posting.
I want to walk through what a ghost job actually is versus what people assume it is, the deliberate reasons companies keep doing it, and what’s finally starting to shift now that it’s costing companies more than one annoyed applicant.
What a ghost job actually is, and how common it really is
A ghost job is a listing posted with no real, current intent to fill it. That’s a different problem than a slow hire, or a role stuck in approval limbo for a few extra weeks. It stays live because keeping it up serves some purpose other than hiring someone.
Greenhouse, the applicant-tracking platform thousands of companies run their hiring through, has the closest thing to hard data on this, because it’s sitting on the postings themselves. Its State of Job Hunting report, published in December 2024, found that in any given quarter, 18 to 22% of the jobs posted on its platform get classified as ghost jobs. That’s Greenhouse measuring how its own listings actually behaved.
Pulled from Greenhouse’s own platform data and a fresh 2026 job-seeker survey.
A ghost job stays open because leaving it up serves a purpose that has nothing to do with hiring anyone.
I’ve mentioned before that roughly a quarter of listings are ghost jobs as part of a wider look at why the market feels broken right now. The numbers above are the research behind that estimate. What changes from source to source is what’s actually being counted. Greenhouse is counting postings. ResumeBuilder, in the next section, is counting companies. Resume Genius is counting how often a job seeker walks away suspicious. All three point the same direction.
Why companies post ghost jobs on purpose
I’ve watched requisitions stay open past the point anyone in the room actually intended to fill them, for reasons that came down entirely to optics. A posting is cheap. Leaving one up costs a company nothing compared to what taking it down might signal to a boss, a board, or a team that’s already stretched thin.
ResumeBuilder ran the most direct version of this question I’ve seen. Working with Pollfish, they surveyed those 1,641 hiring managers starting in May 2024. Forty percent said their company posted a fake listing in the past year. Thirty percent, three in ten, currently have one active. Of the companies that had done it before, 79% were still doing it.
| To appear open to outside talent | 67% |
|---|---|
| To signal company growth | 66% |
| To make current workers feel replaceable | 62% |
Two more reasons trailed close behind: 63% said it makes employees believe their workload is about to shrink, and 59% said it’s a way to collect resumes for whenever a real opening shows up. Source: ResumeBuilder.com, surveying 1,641 hiring managers, 2024.
What surprised me was how little guilt came with the reasons themselves. Seventy percent of those same hiring managers, 43% saying “definitely” and 27% saying “probably,” called the practice morally acceptable.
That gap between what companies think and what job seekers actually experience showed up in the open recently, on Reddit. Someone in r/jobsearchhell asked their own HR department directly why a listing had stayed live, and the thread landed 1,028 points and 126 comments. The top reply, once it got shared, is about as plain as this gets.
It makes perfect sense if you view potential applicants as a, well, resource instead of thinking of them as actual human beings who are hopeful to get the job they are applying for so they can earn a living wage.
Another commenter on that same thread, u/scariestJ, named the pattern for what it actually is: “we would have called it a talent pool pre-Covid where you send a resume but have no expectation of a job rather than a dubious carrot on a massive stick.” The practice is a rebrand of something recruiters have been doing quietly for years, now with enough scale and enough angry applicants that it finally has a name people search for.
What it costs the person applying, and what’s starting to change
None of this stays contained to a bad afternoon of scrolling job boards. A recruiter who runs a job-search account tested it directly: she applied to 40 jobs using a deliberately polished, completely fabricated LinkedIn profile and resume, built to look like an ideal candidate, to see which postings would actually engage with her. The reel hit 153,000 views and 126 comments, most of them people describing the same experience with their own, real applications.
Some of what shows up under posts like that gets at a mechanism that makes the whole problem worse. “I saw that most companies use A.I screenings for resumes, and it goes through all one company. So if you get rejected from one job you get rejected from thousands bc it all goes through the one A.i,” one commenter wrote under a related reel about getting ghosted after an interview. That’s not literally how automated screening works. Rejections don’t cascade through one shared AI across every employer. But the instinct behind the comment tracks something real. I’ve written before about how AI resume screening actually discriminates, and a ghost job sitting in the same pipeline as a real automated rejection makes the whole process feel, and in some ways function, like a black box nobody can reason their way through.
The emotional language people reach for is blunt. “anyone else have PTSD applying to jobs in the last few years???” one TikTok creator asked, tagging the post #ghostjobs and #jobmarket, and the comments filled in with the same story over and over. It’s shorthand for an application process that gives you nothing back to work with, not even a rejection.
Some job seekers have stopped waiting on employers to fix this and started building their own workarounds. A crowdsourced tracker called Did They Ghost You lets applicants log which companies go silent, and it picked up 484 points and 221 comments on Hacker News. A smaller project on GitHub, job-radar, is trying to filter listings automatically before anyone wastes an afternoon on one.
The bigger shift is regulatory, and it’s brand new. In July 2026, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton opened an investigation into LinkedIn, issuing a Civil Investigative Demand for documents, internal communications, and data on how the company markets, verifies, and sells access to job postings through its Premium subscriptions, which run $39.99 to $69.99 a month. The core allegation is straightforward: LinkedIn doesn’t independently verify that a posting is still live, and Paxton’s office is asking whether selling access to unverified listings violates the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
A state attorney general treating stale job listings as a consumer-protection problem is a different level of pressure than this practice has ever faced.
No lawsuit has been filed yet, and LinkedIn hasn’t been found to have done anything wrong. But a state attorney general’s office treating stale job listings as a consumer-protection question is a different level of pressure than this practice has faced before.
Reflective Coda
None of this means every unanswered application is a ghost job. Most of the silence in a job search is still just slow hiring, a broken process, or a role that got filled internally before the posting came down. Treating every gap in your inbox as proof of a fake listing will make you paranoid about postings that are actually fine.
What I’d actually do with this is treat a few specific signals as real information. A posting that’s been live for months with no interview movement you can find evidence of. A requisition that gets reposted every few weeks with the same generic requirements. A role with no salary range attached in a state that legally requires one. None of these prove a listing is fake by themselves, but stacked together, they’re worth weighing before you sink another cover letter into it. If you want the fuller playbook for triaging a search like this, I’ve written about surviving a tough market before, and separately, about what the silence itself does to you if you let it.
The thing I keep coming back to, from the other side of that table, is that a ghost job is a decision somebody made in a room, for reasons that lived entirely inside that room. I sat in those rooms. The posting staying up was a line item somebody forgot to close out. Reading it as a verdict on yourself gives it a weight nobody in that room ever put there.
Not every job you’re applying to is real, and now you know why. Keep applying. Just stop taking the silence personally and spend that energy on the postings actually worth it.
Sources
- State of Job Hunting Report (Greenhouse, Dec 2024)
- 1 in 5 job postings aren’t real, recent study finds (FOX 7 Austin, Jan 2025)
- 3 in 10 Companies Currently Have Fake Job Postings Listed (ResumeBuilder.com, 2024)
- Ghost Jobs Still Haunting 67% of Job Seekers, Report Finds (CPA Practice Advisor, Apr 2026)
- Attorney General Ken Paxton Investigates LinkedIn for Advertising Fake and Misleading Job Opportunities (Office of the Attorney General of Texas, Jul 2026)
- I asked my HR why we have ghost job openings, got an interesting response (r/jobsearchhell, Jul 2026)
- @emily.the.recruiter’s 40-application ghost job experiment (Instagram, Jul 2026)
- Comment thread on getting ghosted after an interview (Instagram, Jul 2026)
- @jiadevaia, on job search burnout (TikTok, Aug 2026)
- Did They Ghost You? (crowdsourced ghosting tracker)
- job-radar (JoshDrentlaw, GitHub)
- Emily Backes, “Is the Job Market Actually That Bad or Is It Just Me?”, 2026.
- Emily Backes, “The AI Screening Your Resume Discriminates by Race and Gender. Here’s What You Need to Know.”, 2026.
- Emily Backes, “How to Find (and Get) a Job in a Tough Market (2026)”, 2026.
- Emily Backes, “Job Search Burnout: How to Keep Going When You’re Drained”, 2026.
