Ghost Jobs: Why Some Postings Aren't Real
A fifth of postings are not being actively filled. Here is how to tell.
You find the posting on a Tuesday night. It fits: right shift pattern, right distance, pay in the range you need. You spend forty minutes on the application because the form will not accept your certification as an upload and makes you retype it. You submit it.
Nothing happens. Not a rejection, not an acknowledgement. Nothing.
Six weeks later the same posting is still up, still listed as new.
That job may never have existed. Research from Greenhouse and ResumeBuilder found that in 2024 and 2025, roughly 22% of job postings were roles the company had no immediate intention of filling. In corporate services the figure reached 31%. Not one in fifty. Closer to one in five.
Why companies post jobs they don't intend to fill
There is rarely anything as deliberate as a conspiracy behind it. Ghost jobs accumulate for four fairly mundane reasons.
Some are pipeline building. The company wants a stack of applications on file for a role it expects to open next quarter, so it posts now and collects. Some are for show: a wall of openings signals growth to investors, customers, and the competition, and costs nothing to maintain. Some exist because a manager is legally or internally required to advertise a role that has already been promised to someone. And a great many are simply abandoned. The role got filled, or cancelled, or the budget vanished, and nobody went back to take the posting down.
The reasons differ. The effect on you is identical.
| Reported figure | |
|---|---|
| Postings not actively being filled, all sectors | 22% |
| Postings not actively being filled, corporate services | 31% |
| Jobseekers ghosted after an interview | 61% |
The cost falls entirely on one side
A ghost job costs the employer nothing. The posting sits there. Applications arrive and go unread in a system nobody has opened in a month.
For you, the same posting costs an evening, and evenings are not free. If you are working shifts already, the hour you spend on an application is an hour taken from sleep or from your family. Multiply that by the twenty or thirty applications it now takes to get anywhere and the real price of the practice becomes clear. It is not just discouraging. It is unpaid work, done on spec, for a transaction that was never open.
And it goes past the application stage. Greenhouse found that ghosting now happens well after people have taken time off work to interview:
Ghosting is on the rise: 61% of job seekers have been ghosted after a job interview, a nine percentage point increase since 2024.
Sixty-one percent. After an interview, when someone has already met you.
How to spot one before you apply
You cannot tell for certain from the outside, but you can shift the odds. Before you spend the evening, check:
- How long has it been up? Most boards show a posting date, and many quietly refresh it. If you first saw the role two months ago and it still says "new", treat that as a signal.
- Is it the same text as three other companies? Copy a distinctive sentence and search for it. Boilerplate reposted across employers usually means an agency is collecting applications, not filling a specific vacancy.
- Does it name the actual work? A real posting for real work can tell you the shift pattern, the site, the equipment, and the pay. Vagueness on all four is the strongest single tell.
- Is there a named person or team? Not always present even on genuine roles, but its presence is a good sign.
- Does the employer respond to anything? Send a short question about start date or shift pattern. Silence tells you what an application would have told you, and costs two minutes instead of forty.
- Has the company just announced a freeze or layoffs? Postings often stay live long after the budget behind them has gone.
None of these is conclusive on its own. Two or three together usually are.
What would actually fix it
Advice for jobseekers is a way of managing the problem, not solving it. The problem is structural: posting a job is free, and there is no cost to leaving it up.
The fix has to sit with how hiring works, not how carefully people apply. If a role has to be a real, funded vacancy with a start date and a pay rate before a worker is ever shown it, most ghost postings simply cannot exist. That is closer to how matching works when the effort sits with the system rather than the applicant, and it is the same argument as the one for showing people why they were matched to a job. All three come down to whether the employer's intent gets checked as carefully as the worker's credentials.
At Swipejobs, jobs shown to a worker are live shifts from an employer who has asked for someone, with the pay and the hours attached. That is not a moral position. It is what a matching system requires in order to function at all: you cannot match against a vacancy that isn't there.
The job market is not short of workers. It is short of honest postings. Until an employer's intent is checked as rigorously as a candidate's certifications, ghost jobs will keep taking evenings from the people who can least afford to give them away.