How Common Are Ghost Jobs, and How Do You Tell If a Posting Is Real?
How to read a posting's date at the source before you apply, what its age can and can't tell you, and what each published ghost-job number counts.
By Alexander Hoff · Founder
You found a posting that fits, and the application will take you two hours. Before you start, you want to know whether anyone is hiring for it. Nobody outside the company can tell you that for certain. What you can find out in a couple of minutes is whether the posting is still on the company's own job board and, on some boards, when the company first put it up. As for how common ghost jobs are, there is no official count, and the published figures each measure something different.
People use the term loosely. Greenhouse defines ghost jobs as "positions advertised with no intent to hire" in its 2024 State of Job Hunting report. A St. Louis Fed blog post describes them as "listings that remain open without immediate intent to hire." The Muse's guide treats a posting that is live on a job site but missing from the company's careers page as a warning sign, which can also mean the role has simply closed. In this post a ghost job means a posting for a role the company never meant to fill. An old posting is not proof of one, and neither is a posting that disappears. Real roles get pulled when someone is hired, when the budget moves, or when the plan changes.
How do I check whether a job posting is still real?
Go to the company's own careers site and find the posting there. If the site runs on Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever or Workday, you can also read the date the posting went up, in a browser, without an account. The Muse and Dice both tell you to check the careers page. The steps below also get you the date.
- Open the company's careers page and click the role. If it's on LinkedIn or another job site but not here, the copy you found has probably outlived the job.
- Look at the address bar, or at the address the Apply button sends you to. It shows the hiring system:
job-boards.greenhouse.io/oracme/ jobs/ 4012345 boards.greenhouse.io/is Greenhouse,acme/ jobs/ 4012345 jobs.ashbyhq.com/acme/…is Ashby,jobs.lever.co/acme/…is Lever, andacme.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/is Workday. An address on the company's own site with… gh_jid=in it means Greenhouse too; for that one, try the page-source check in step 03.
- In a Greenhouse address, the word after the domain (
acmehere) is the board name and the number at the end is the job number. Openhttps://boards-api.greenhouse.io/with those two swapped in.v1/ boards/ acme/ jobs/ 4012345 - The page is plain text. Find
first_published, the date the posting first went live. It appears in Greenhouse's documented example response. Ignoreupdated_at. It's usually later thanfirst_published, so it makes a posting look newer than it is. - An error usually means the posting is gone from the board, or there's a typo in the address. To search by title instead, open
https://boards-api.greenhouse.io/, which lists every open job with the same date field.v1/ boards/ acme/ jobs
- On a computer, open the posting and view its source (Ctrl+U on Windows, Cmd+Option+U on a Mac; Safari needs "Show features for web developers" turned on in Settings, under Advanced). Search the source for
datePosted. - That field is there for Google's job search, which requires it and defines it as "the original date that employer posted the job." On the Workday sites we checked, the page stops at "Posted 30+ Days Ago", but the source still carries the date.
- On Ashby, read it as the last time the posting was published. Ashby's documentation defines its publishing date as "when the job was last published," so an old date means the posting has been up at least that long, and a recent one doesn't prove the role is new.
- A careers site on another system may carry
datePostedin its source too, since Google requires it for job listings in its search. - If there's no date anywhere, all you can confirm is that the role is still listed.
If you'd rather not look up the board yourself, Telosi's free Research Brief page looks for the company's board on Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever or Workday and, when it finds one, lists the roles open there, so you can pick the real posting.
What does a posting's age tell me, and what can't it?
It tells you how long the posting has been up. It doesn't tell you why it's still up.
For a sense of what counts as old, we checked a random sample of 717 live company job boards on Greenhouse on September 21, 2026. Of their 24,401 open postings, 36% had first gone up more than 90 days earlier, and 8% more than a year earlier. The median open posting had been up 55 days, and on the typical board about a third of the openings were more than 90 days old. Those figures measure age, so they can't tell you how many of the postings were ghosts.
A posting up for five months could be a hard search for a senior engineer, a sales role the company hires into every month, a frozen req, or a ghost.
| What it is | What's going on | What the check shows |
|---|---|---|
| A stale listing | The role filled or closed, and a copy still circulates on job sites | Gone from the company's board |
| A standing or pipeline posting | The company hires for the role all year, or collects applicants for a talent pool | Old and still listed |
| A hard-to-fill role | Real, open, and not yet filled | Old and still listed |
| A paused req | Hiring is on hold | Old, and it may stay listed |
| A ghost job | The company never meant to fill it | Any age |
Don't count on the title to sort them. In our sample, only about 1 in 20 of the postings that had been up for more than a year said in the title that they were a general application or a talent pool. The rest looked like any other job.
Apply the way you normally would. Most open postings in our sample were younger than that.
Look for more before you spend the two hours: a recruiter posting about the role, recent hires on the team, news of funding or a new product. Then message the recruiter or hiring manager with two plain questions. Is the role still active, and when do they expect to decide?
Log the posting date next to the date you applied in your job application tracker. After a few weeks you'll see whether the applications that went unanswered were mostly the old postings.
If neither the board nor the page source gives a date, being listed on the company's own board is all you can confirm. Look for the same outside signs as for an old posting, and ask the recruiter the same two questions.
If the locations differ, they're probably separate openings. If they match, ask the recruiter whether it's one role they hire into all year.
How common are ghost jobs?
Nobody knows precisely. In April 2025 the Congressional Research Service wrote, "There are no official statistics on the magnitude of ghost jobs" (CRS In Focus IF12977). The published numbers come from vendors and surveys, and each one counts something different.
| Figure | Source, year, sample | What it counts |
|---|---|---|
| 18–22% of jobs posted in any given quarter | Greenhouse, December 2024; posting count and method not disclosed | Postings on Greenhouse's own platform that Greenhouse classifies as ghost jobs |
| 18% of open jobs in 2024 not filled | Ashby, April 2025; more than 22,000 jobs at its customers, 2021 to 2024 | Jobs that ended without a hire, a wider group than jobs nobody meant to fill |
| 40% of hiring managers | ResumeBuilder.com, June 2024; 1,641 screened on a survey panel | Hiring managers who said their company posted a fake job listing in the past year |
| 81% of recruiters | MyPerfectResume, August 2024; 753 U.S. recruiters | Recruiters who said their employer posts ads for jobs that don't exist or are already filled |
| 45% "regularly", 48% "occasionally", 5% special circumstances only, 2% not at all | LiveCareer, May 2025; 918 HR professionals | How often HR staff say they post listings they don't intend to fill |
| Three in five candidates | Greenhouse, December 2024; survey of 2,500 workers in the US, UK and Germany | Candidates who suspect they've encountered a ghost job |
Ashby adds that its own customers are "far less likely to be posting ghost jobs."
The three employer surveys come out much higher because they count companies, not postings. A company that ran one such posting can answer the same way as a company that ran fifty. All three come from resume and career-tools companies, and none discloses a probability sample. The candidate figure measures suspicion, so it can't tell you how many postings are fake.
If you've had a run of silence and want to know whether the postings are the problem or your applications are, why you're not getting interviews covers the other half.
Why do companies post jobs they don't plan to fill?
- Pipeline building. In LiveCareer's 2025 survey of 918 HR professionals, 48% said they "occasionally" post ghost jobs "for special needs like seasonal hiring or building out a talent pipeline" (LiveCareer). Some of those postings may be standing roles the company hires into all year. If a posting looks like one, ask the recruiter whether there's a current opening behind it.
- Postings nobody takes down. The 81% in MyPerfectResume's recruiter survey covers ads for jobs "already filled," which describes a listing left up after the hire as much as a fake one.
- Openings aimed at people who already have jobs. A November 2025 St. Louis Fed blog post, summarizing a Fed working paper that models U.S. data from 1978 to 2024, reports that even as firms post far more "poaching" openings aimed at employed workers, job changes barely rise. The authors say this suggests that many postings "are not linked to hiring activity," a finding they call "consistent with data on 'ghost jobs.'" It's their interpretation, on a staff blog, and they didn't count ghost jobs directly.
Is it legal to post a job you don't plan to fill?
Few places have a specific rule. As of September 2026, Ontario is the only jurisdiction we checked with a ghost-job disclosure rule in force. Since January 1, 2026, employers there with 25 or more employees must say in a public posting whether a vacancy exists, and must tell interviewed applicants within 45 days whether a hiring decision has been made.
New York's S8877 passed the Senate in April 2026 and the Assembly in June 2026, and as of September 2026 it had not been signed into law. It would cover employers with 100 or more employees and require each posting to say whether the vacancy will be filled by a date, no sooner than a date, or is not for a current vacancy. New Jersey's S2136 is still pending after a committee amended it in May 2026. California's AB 1251 passed the Assembly in June 2025, was held in the Senate Appropriations Committee that August, and never came up again before the legislature's August 2026 deadline. Kentucky's HB 57 never left committee. The Congressional Research Service found no federal bill as of April 2025, and we've found none since.
What else do people ask about ghost jobs?
If I got an interview, was the job real?
Not necessarily. In ResumeBuilder.com's 2024 survey, 649 hiring managers said their company had posted a fake listing, and among those whose companies contacted applicants, 85% said the candidates were interviewed. Before the interview ends, ask when they expect to make a decision, and put that date in your tracker.
Does a recent date mean the role is new?
Not always. Greenhouse's documentation gives each job post its own ID, separate from the internal_job_id of the job itself. So one role can have more than one post, and a post's first_published date may not tell you when the role first opened. On Ashby, the date changes whenever the company republishes.
Should I skip every posting that's more than 90 days old?
No. More than a third of the open postings in our sample were that old, and a long-open posting can be a hard-to-fill or standing role that does hire. Use the age to decide how much to invest, and whether to ask the hiring team first.
Is it rude to ask a recruiter whether a role is still open?
No. Keep it to two sentences. Name the role and its job number, and ask whether it's still active.
Does a verification badge on LinkedIn mean the job is real?
It verifies the company and the person posting. LinkedIn says the badge means the company has a verified page and the poster has confirmed they work there, and that it "does not mean you are more likely to be hired."
Can I report a posting I think is a ghost job?
On Indeed, yes. Indeed says job seekers can click "Report Job" on a listing to flag a concern.