Roughly one in five job listings may be a ghost job, going by the only two serious attempts to put a prevalence number on the problem. That is a lot less alarming than the figures that usually get quoted.
A Baruch College working paper by Hunter Ng found that up to 21% of job ads may be ghost jobs (arXiv, October 2024, a preprint, not yet peer-reviewed). Greenhouse, reading its own applicant-tracking data, classified 18 to 22% of the jobs on its platform as ghost jobs in any given quarter (2024 State of Job Hunting report, December 2024).
Neither is an official statistic. The Congressional Research Service reported in April 2025 that no official statistics on the magnitude of ghost jobs exist, and that the estimates in circulation come from firms marketing hiring-related services, often with too little methodological detail to judge their quality.
One in five is still a lot. It also means that if you applied weeks ago and heard nothing, the silence is not a verdict on you or your resume; a meaningful share of listings were never moving at all. This guide traces each circulating figure to its method first. If you only want the practical checks, they are in “How can you tell if a job posting is a ghost job” below.
What is a ghost job?
A ghost job is a public job posting that no one is genuinely hiring for. Greenhouse’s working definition is the clean one to keep: a position advertised with no intent to hire. That covers a role that was already filled but never taken down, and a posting kept live to collect resumes for a hire the company might make later.
Is it a ghost job or a scam?
The two get conflated, and they should not be. A job scam is a criminal attempt to take your money or identity, and it announces itself with different tells: a salary too good to be true, an interview conducted over text message, a request for payment up front. A ghost job wastes your time; a scam tries to rob you, and most of this guide is about the first.
What percentage of job listings are actually fake?
About one in five. The two measurements that actually count postings land at 18 to 22% (Greenhouse) and up to 21% (Ng), and every scarier figure comes from a method with a flaw you can name. Four kinds of numbers circulate, and they measure four different things.
| How it’s measured | Example | Headline number | What it actually measures |
|---|---|---|---|
| Posting-level data | Greenhouse platform data (Dec 2024); Ng, Baruch College (Oct 2024) | 18 to 22%; up to 21% | Postings that never produced a hire, judged from ATS outcomes or interview-review text |
| Staleness proxy | ResumeUp.AI LinkedIn scrape (2025) | 27.4% | How long postings stay up; a slow real hire trips the same wire |
| JOLTS stock minus flow | MyPerfectResume (Nov 2025) | About 30%, “1 in 3” | The monthly gap between open positions and completed hires |
| Employer self-report | ResumeBuilder (Jun 2024); LiveCareer (Mar 2025) | 40% of companies; “93%” of HR professionals | How many respondents admit the practice, not how many listings are affected |
The top row is the defensible one. Greenhouse watched jobs on its own applicant-tracking platform and got 18 to 22% per quarter, and its flag was age plus outcome: postings open 30 days or more that produced no hire, read alongside other signals. That outcome data is what separates its 30-day gate from the staleness proxies below, which use a similar cutoff with nothing underneath it.
Ng took the other route. He fine-tuned a language model to read Glassdoor interview reviews and infer which postings never led anywhere, which is why his abstract says up to 21% “may be” ghost jobs rather than stating a flat rate. Both are 2024 work, and no better listing-level prevalence estimate has been published since. When people cite “a 2025 Greenhouse study,” they are recycling the December 2024 report; Greenhouse’s February 2026 report does not mention ghost jobs at all.
What about the widely shared 27.4%? ResumeUp.AI’s claim that 27.4% of U.S. LinkedIn listings are likely ghost jobs (reported by Entrepreneur, 2025) comes from scraping LinkedIn and bucketing postings by how many days they have been active. There is no outcome data underneath it, just an age cutoff, so a slow real hire gets counted as a ghost job.
The most-repeated figure of all is the shakiest. The “1 in 3 U.S. job listings lead nowhere” claim comes from a MyPerfectResume analysis (November 2025) that subtracts the government’s monthly hires from its count of job openings and calls the gap ghost jobs. The trouble is that openings and hires are not the same kind of measurement. Openings are a stock, a snapshot of positions still open on the last business day of each month. Hires are a flow, the people who started during that month. A real job that takes two months to fill shows up in two monthly snapshots while producing one hire, so the subtraction overcounts by design.
CNBC, reporting the same figure, carried the caveat the headlines dropped: the ratio of openings to hires has actually fallen since 2022. By this proxy’s own logic, ghost jobs would be shrinking, not surging.
The surveys measure something true but different. ResumeBuilder surveyed 1,641 hiring managers, 649 of whom completed the full survey (June 2024), and found that 40% of companies said they had posted a fake listing in the past year, and 30% had one active at the time. A LiveCareer survey of 918 HR professionals (March 2025) produced the viral “93%,” which is 45% who say they post ghost jobs “regularly” plus 48% who say “occasionally,” added together. Both are self-reported.
Note the units, because this is where the laundering happens. ResumeBuilder counts companies, LiveCareer counts the HR professionals answering, and neither counts listings. “Forty percent of companies posted a fake listing in the past year” is a different statement from “40% of the postings you see are fake,” and the second reading is how the number usually gets repeated. The same laundering pattern built the “75% ATS auto-reject” myth.
One in five is the number to trust, with the honest asterisk that even it is an estimate, not a census.
Why do companies post jobs they don’t intend to fill?
Some reasons are cynical and some are mundane, and sorting them matters because it decides how angry you should be. On the cynical side: a company signals growth to investors or rivals by advertising roles it will not fill, or it keeps a pipeline of resumes warm for a hire it might make next quarter. The employer surveys above are companies admitting to roughly this.
The mundane reasons are probably more common and get less airtime. A role gets filled internally and nobody circles back to take the posting down. A recruiter leaves and the req sits untouched. A hiring freeze lands after the job went live. None of this excuses the practice, but weeks-old listings usually reflect process failure. Deliberate deception is rarer than the discourse suggests, and the difference changes how you should read any single posting.
Which industries and companies post the most ghost jobs?
The only breakdown that comes from the prevalence-style measurements is Ng’s, and it points at large mid-size companies rather than any one villain industry. In his data, firms with 1,001 to 5,000 employees showed the highest share of ghost-job signals, at 24.8%; that sits above his overall “up to 21%” because the headline figure averages across all firm sizes. The smallest firms, under 50 employees, sat lowest at 14.5%, and the very largest, over 10,000, landed at 18.7%. His read: mid-size companies have HR capacity and job-ad credits to spare, while small firms run leaner and the giants have other ways to read the market.
The sector pattern in the same data leans high-skill. Publishing, internet and web services, and software development ranked among the sectors with the most ghost-job signals; routine and less-skilled work such as restaurants sat at the bottom. Treat these cuts with the same caution as the headline number: they classify interview reviews with a language model rather than auditing listings. But if you are applying to specialized roles at mid-size companies, the base rate you are up against likely runs higher than average, and the checks below earn their keep.
How can you tell if a job posting is a ghost job?
You cannot, not with certainty, and any tool or checklist that promises otherwise is overselling. What you can do is weigh signals. Treat each one as evidence of friction; none of them proves intent, because every signal here also fires on a perfectly real job that is simply moving slowly. Stack them.
The checks that actually tell you something:
- The role is not on the company’s own careers page. This is the most defensible check by a wide margin. A listing on the company’s own careers page is much more likely to be active than a board-only copy, because job boards routinely scrape and keep republishing stale ones. It is not a guarantee: the employer surveys above are companies admitting they post listings they don’t intend to fill, and those live on company sites too. The innocent version: smaller employers and some staffing arrangements post only to boards.
- The same req is reposted again and again without the search ever seeming to progress. Serial reposting can mean a role nobody is closing. It can also mean a genuinely hard search, or a board’s automatic refresh doing its thing.
- The description is generic boilerplate with no reporting line, no named team, and no concrete responsibilities. Real hiring managers usually want specifics in front of candidates. Thin copy can also just be a rushed posting.
The signals people over-trust:
- Silence after you apply. No acknowledgment is genuinely common even at real employers, which makes it a weak signal on its own.
- The listing has been live a long time. Age is the weakest signal of all, even though the scary statistics lean on it hardest.
How long is too long for a job to stay posted?
There is no reliable red line. Thirty, sixty, and ninety days all get cited, but real roles routinely stay up past 30 days, senior and specialized ones especially, and boards auto-refresh listings in ways that reset the visible clock in both directions. Use age only as a tiebreaker on top of the checks above, never as the verdict.
What are the signs of a search that is actually moving?
The marks worth looking for:
- A named hiring manager or recruiter on the post.
- A specific start timeline.
- A salary range (increasingly required by law; more on that below).
- Recent hires visible at the company.
- On platforms that offer it, a verification badge.
Indeed, which stated in May 2026 that it does not allow ghost jobs on its platform, points candidates toward the same tells from the other direction: a verifiable employer, a recent posting date, a detailed role-specific description, and clearly defined qualifications. LinkedIn’s product answer, described by its career-products lead in Fast Company, June 2025, is verification badges, which confirm information about the company and the person posting. That is identity, not intent: a badge tells you a real employer is behind the post. Whether the search is moving is a separate question.
What does it mean when a job is reposted?
Less than you might fear. If a job you already applied to or interviewed for reappears, that can mean a re-budgeted or reopened search, and a reposted role is sometimes exactly when a real hire is imminent. Many job boards also auto-repost or refresh listings on a cycle, which can make a stale posting look freshly minted or a filled one look open. The version that belongs on the signal list above is serial reposting of an identical req with no visible progress. A single repost tells you very little on its own.
Should you reapply when a job you interviewed for is reposted?
Not silently, into the same pile. If you got as far as an interview, send one short note to the recruiter or hiring manager you already spoke with: you saw the role reposted, and you are still interested if the search has changed. A warm previous candidate is valuable in exactly that moment. If nobody answers, that tells you about the search too.
Are ghost jobs illegal?
Mostly no, though the law has started to move. Ontario became the first jurisdiction to regulate ghost postings; in the United States nothing has been enacted yet, and New York is closest.
| Jurisdiction | What it requires | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Ontario, Canada | Existing-vacancy, comp-range, and AI-screening disclosure; 45-day decision for interviewed candidates (employers with 25+ staff) | In force since January 1, 2026 |
| New York | Posting-disclosure requirements (S8877) | Passed both chambers (Senate April 2026, Assembly June 2, 2026); awaits the governor’s signature |
| Pennsylvania | Posting-disclosure bill (HB 2321) | In committee since March 2026 |
| New Jersey | Disclosure bill | Pending |
| California | AB 1251 | Pending |
| Kentucky | Ghost-posting bill | Failed |
| U.S. federal | No bill explicitly addressing ghost jobs has been introduced, per the Congressional Research Service (April 2025) | None introduced |
So in most places, posting a job with no intention of filling it remains bad practice and perfectly legal. Ontario shows where the law may be heading, and New York may be next.
Do ghost jobs collect your resume and data?
Yes, that can be the point. Resume collection is one of the reasons employers admit to in the surveys above: keeping a pipeline warm for a hire they might make later. Applying to a ghost job can mean your resume sits in a company’s applicant-tracking system waiting for a search that has not started. At a legitimate company that is an annoyance, and the posting’s privacy policy still governs your data. A scam posting is the dangerous case: it wants your identity, and it announces itself with the tells covered at the top of this guide.
Do recruiters know when a posting is a ghost job?
Often, yes. The LiveCareer and ResumeBuilder surveys above are HR professionals and hiring managers describing the practice themselves, and keeping a pipeline warm does not happen by accident. But a recruiter can also inherit a req that is quietly dead because the budget went away and nobody told them. That is one more reason the fastest test is asking a named person a direct question about the role.
What should you do instead of worrying about ghost jobs?
Spend less energy diagnosing ghost jobs and more energy routing around them. The habit that does the most work is verifying at the source. Before you invest real effort in a listing you found on a board, open the company’s own careers page and confirm the role is there too. If it is, the odds tilt strongly toward a live search, though the careers-page check filters out scrape rot; it cannot prove intent. If it is not, you have learned something useful for the price of one search box.
Weight your effort toward fresh postings at companies you can confirm are hiring. Recent dates, visible recent hires, a named person attached to the req, a salary range that a growing number of jurisdictions now force into the open: these are cheap to check and they concentrate your time on searches that are actually moving.
And when a listing clears those bars but you still want certainty, ask one human question. A short, specific message to the recruiter or hiring manager named on the post, or to someone on the team, does two things at once. Something as simple as: “I applied for [role] last week and want to make sure the search is still active before I invest more time in the process. Are you still reviewing candidates?” A real search answers, and the silence of a ghost job answers too. It is a faster and more honest test than any age-based checker, because it goes straight to the one thing every signal on this page is only guessing at: whether a person is actually on the other end.
How we know this: the prevalence figures are traced to their origins, not to the outlets that repeated them. The one-in-five range comes from Greenhouse’s own platform data (December 2024) and Hunter Ng’s arXiv preprint (October 2024); the method descriptions for each (Greenhouse: 30-plus days with no hire, alongside other signals; Ng: language-model classification of Glassdoor interview reviews) are taken from those reports directly, and the company-size and sector cuts come from the same Ng preprint. The “no official statistics” anchor is the Congressional Research Service (April 2025). The one-in-three figure is traced to MyPerfectResume’s JOLTS-based analysis, with the stock-versus-flow caveat drawn from CNBC’s coverage. Employer-behavior figures come from the ResumeBuilder (June 2024) and LiveCareer (March 2025) surveys and are labeled self-reported throughout. Legislative statuses are cited to the bill pages themselves as of July 9, 2026. Where a number is a proxy or a survey rather than a direct measurement, we have said so in the sentence that uses it.