---
title: "Ghost Jobs: Why Employers Advertise Work They Are Not Hiring For"
description: "A survey of 649 hiring managers found close to 40% admitted their employer had run ghost adverts. Here is why it happens, how to test a listing in one message, and what honest employers owe applicants."
author: "Marcus Telle"
category: "Candidate Perspective"
date: 2026-10-12T09:25:46.082Z
canonical: "https://theartofpeople.io/blog/are-ghost-jobs-real-why-companies-post-them"
---

# Ghost Jobs: Why Employers Advertise Work They Are Not Hiring For

![job, interview, hiring](https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2018/11/02/10/51/job-3790033_1280.jpg?w=1200&q=75)

> A survey of 649 hiring managers found close to 40% admitted their employer had run ghost adverts. Here is why it happens, how to test a listing in one message, and what honest employers owe applicants.

Three hours of a Sunday evening: a cover letter that names a real project, a CV reordered so the relevant years sit at the top, and a few considered lines addressed to whoever will manage the role. Then a month of nothing. By the time you open the next advert, a thought has settled in. Did anybody intend to read that?

Sometimes the honest answer is no. Recruiters have a word for a listing with no job behind it. They call it a ghost.

## A Role With Nothing Solid Inside It

Call it a listing for work that no employer is presently attempting to staff. The metaphor earns its keep. The role is visible, you can walk straight through it, and there is no body there to meet you. What the applicant feels is smaller than outrage and more corrosive: an evening given away, with no acknowledgement that it was taken.

The people who publish these listings are not pantomime villains. [Fox 26 Houston](https://www.fox26houston.com/news/fake-jobs-becoming-growing-problem-real-job-seekers) set out several ordinary motives: soothing colleagues who are buried in work by showing that help is on the way, projecting an impression of growth, and gathering names for openings that may arrive later. Each of those reads as sensible from a desk inside the building. From outside, they look like a door that does not open.

## Three Desks, Three Versions of the Same Advert

Sit at the applicant's desk and the story is attrition. Hours go out, nothing comes back, and belief in the whole market thins. Gartner survey findings reported by [HR Dive](https://www.hrdive.com/news/fake-job-candidates-ai/757126/) put that thinning plainly: roughly half of those surveyed doubted that the vacancies in front of them were genuine at all. For an industry whose entire purpose is matching people to work, that is a damning thing to have measured.

Sit at the hiring manager's desk and the advert is a placeholder. A headcount request was approved in the spring, then quietly frozen in the summer, and the requisition is still open in the system because nobody closed it. The approval exists. A start date does not. Posting feels like diligence rather than deception.

The recruiter sits between those two desks and answers the messages. Many of them loathe the practice, because it makes their honest adverts look like everybody else's bait. Our piece on [what a hiring manager misses when the recruiter goes quiet](/what-hiring-managers-dont-see-when-a-recruiter-goes-quiet-7y2f) describes that view from behind the inbox.

## Weighing the Numbers Without Overclaiming Them

Everything we know about how common this is comes from people filling in surveys about an embarrassing habit, so read the figures as weather rather than arithmetic. [The Stack Overflow blog](https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/12/26/the-ghost-jobs-haunting-your-career-search/) points to a much-quoted poll of 649 managers with hiring responsibility, nearly 40% of whom admitted their employer had run such adverts inside twelve months. The same piece cites research from Harvard Business School tying the increase to the Great Resignation and to how unpredictable the economy felt through the pandemic.

The knock-on effect reaches well past any single application. Stack Overflow quotes a Forbes writer making the structural case: publishing a job description with no intention of hiring straight away pads the apparent number of vacancies in the economy. Anyone who uses those totals to work out whether an industry is growing, recruiters and applicants both, is working from a padded figure. We cover how to read those signals more carefully in [reading hiring market signals before the headlines catch up](/how-to-read-hiring-market-signals-before-they-hit-the-headlines-7tnz).

Treat any individual figure gently. Samples differ, definitions differ, and self-reporting on an awkward question is never clean. The direction of travel, though, holds across every source we can check. These listings exist in volume.

## Fresher Figures, and a Province That Now Names the Problem

The newer evidence is no tidier than the old, and it points the same way. A Greenhouse study of 4,136 people in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Germany, 2,900 of them looking for work, reported in November 2025 that [69% of American job seekers said they had encountered fake job postings](https://www.greenhouse.com/newsroom/an-ai-trust-crisis-70-of-hiring-managers-trust-ai-to-make-faster-and-better-hiring-decisions-only-8-of-job-seekers-call-it-fair). That is a report of perception, which is exactly the right thing to measure if your question is what this practice does to trust.

A second attempt gets at volume from the other direction. MyPerfectResume took the American government's own openings and hires series and compared them, finding that [about 30% of openings in June 2025 produced no hire, covering more than 2.2 million roles, with the gap sitting between 28% and 38% every month since 2021](https://www.prweb.com/releases/myperfectresume-reveals-the-ghost-job-economy-1-in-3-us-job-listings-lead-nowhere-302609641.html). Read that method carefully before you quote the figure. An opening that produced no hire in June may well produce one in August, so part of that gap is ordinary hiring lag rather than a phantom. What survives the caveat is the stability of the gap: a third of advertised work, month after month, reaching nobody.

The most interesting development is not a statistic at all. Ontario has simply made the housekeeping a legal duty. Under the province's employment standards guidance, for postings made on or after 1 January 2026, employers with 25 or more staff [must say in a publicly advertised posting whether an existing vacancy exists, and must disclose the expected pay](https://www.ontario.ca/document/your-guide-employment-standards-act-0/requirements-related-publicly-advertised-job). The province defines an existing vacancy as a position imminently available for a qualified candidate to fill. Platforms carry a duty of their own there: a visible mechanism for users to report a fraudulent posting. A jurisdiction looked at this habit and decided it was a disclosure problem, which is a view we find persuasive. The pay element is covered in our [primer on publishing salary in adverts](/pay-transparency-job-adverts-founders-primer).

Tooling is starting to follow. Greenhouse now attaches verifications to a company's job posts across four categories it calls Fair, Prepared, Respectful and Communicative, with the [documentation stating that Respectful and Communicative are available on all product tiers while Fair and Prepared belong to its Expert tiers](https://support.greenhouse.io/hc/en-us/articles/28106556004891-Greenhouse-Verified-Overview), and that status refreshes once a day. No price is published for any of it. Treat the badge as what it is: a vendor deciding that answering candidates is now a feature worth advertising.

## Why the Advert Outlives the Budget

Part of this is plumbing rather than ethics. A listing is cheap to publish and nobody owns the task of taking it down. The person who approved the headcount has moved on to a reorganisation, the agency brief is still open, and the advert refreshes itself every fortnight because that is how the setting was left. Nothing in that chain requires anyone to lie. It only requires that closing a role is nobody's job.

Which is why the remedy is dull. Give one person the task of auditing the live adverts once a month and most of the ghosts evaporate. Ask two questions per listing: is the money still there, and does a hiring manager want to interview this week? Anything that fails both comes down, or gets relabelled as a pool.

## What an Honest Employer Can Do in Five Minutes

Not every long-running advert is a ghost. Some firms hire continuously because they need twenty of the same role. Some roles are genuinely hard and take a season to fill for honourable reasons. The tell is behaviour rather than duration. An employer that answers, even curtly and in the negative, is actually recruiting. One that answers nobody at all deserves your caution.

Two habits repair most of the damage and neither costs money. Say in the text whether this is a vacancy you are filling now or a pool you are gathering for later. Then close the listing on the day the role is filled or frozen. That is five minutes of admin in exchange for years of goodwill, which is the sort of arithmetic we argue for in [why the strongest talent strategies take years rather than quarters](/why-the-best-talent-strategies-take-years-not-quarters-wvwt).

## Habits That Protect Your Evenings

If you are the one applying, a few checks guarantee nothing and will still save you hours. These follow the practical advice Fox 26 Houston gathered, plus the ordinary caution of anyone who has spent a winter looking for work.

- Find the posting date. An advert that has been sitting there since the spring deserves a second look before your third hour.

- Open the employer's own careers page. A vacancy that appears on an aggregator yet is absent from the employer's own site invites a question.

- Message someone who works there. One friendly line asking whether the role is live gets answered far more often than people expect.

- Send fewer and better applications to the roles that look alive, and keep a short log so you can follow up once a fair interval has passed.

## Questions That Settle It in One Message

If you would rather test a role than study it, ask. Four questions tend to produce either a straight answer or a revealing pause.

- Who is the hiring manager, and when did they last interview for this role?

- What does the process look like, and how many stages are in it?

- Is there a target start date?

- Has the headcount been signed off, or is approval still working its way through?

An employer with a genuine opening answers all four in a paragraph. A ghost produces warmth and no specifics, which is itself a useful reply. You have accused nobody of anything, and you now know how to spend the rest of your week.

## What Repeated Quiet Does to a Search

The second-order harm deserves naming, because it explains a complaint you hear from the other side of the table. After a run of unanswered applications, most people stop writing bespoke letters and start firing the same one everywhere. Quality drops, replies drop further, and the loop tightens. Recruiters then open weaker applications and complain about declining standards, much of which their own industry manufactured by saying nothing.

A small rule protects your energy here. Decide, before you begin, how much time a role is worth before anyone has spoken to you, and stop at that line. An employer who is slow to answer and woolly about the work has told you plenty inside sixty minutes, and your evening survives.

## The Burden Is Sitting in the Wrong Place

Nearly everything written on this subject, including the useful parts of this article, hands the work to the person with the least power in the exchange. Check the posting date. Cross-reference the careers page. Message a stranger. It is sensible advice and we would still rather not be giving it, because it asks an unpaid applicant to audit an employer's record keeping.

Ontario's approach is the one we would argue for. Say whether a vacancy exists, and answer the people you interviewed inside a fixed number of days. Neither duty requires an employer to hire anybody, neither costs money, and both convert an invisible failure into a visible one. A rule that makes the advertiser declare the thing only the advertiser knows is worth more than a thousand articles teaching candidates to read tea leaves.

We would go one step further than any regulator has, and this is the part employers dislike. Adverts should expire by default rather than refresh by default. The auto-renewal setting is the single mechanism doing most of the damage, and it exists because it suits the platform's inventory and the recruiter's convenience, not because anybody decided a four-month-old advert was honest. Flip the default and most of this problem dies of neglect, which is fitting, since neglect is what created it.

Our argument depends on one fact. If the bulk of that openings-to-hires gap turns out to be ordinary lag, slow approvals and genuinely hard searches, then a disclosure duty adds paperwork to firms already behaving reasonably and changes very little. We think the trust figures argue otherwise, and we would rather be wrong about the paperwork than wrong about the evenings. On the related discipline of actually replying to people, see our [guide to candidate communication](/candidate-communication-during-hiring-process).

## If the Search Starts to Wear You Down

Looking for work is tiring in a way that is easy to underestimate, and ghost adverts make it worse by scrambling the feedback you need in order to steer. Where that quiet begins to colour your sense of your own value, it is worth saying so out loud to someone you trust, or to a qualified professional. Anyone in acute distress should reach a crisis service straight away; the US line is 988, by phone or by text.

On the practical side, a recruiter who knows you is useful. Most will confirm within a day whether a role has a budget behind it, and plenty of genuine vacancies never reach an aggregator in the first place.

These listings are a verdict on an employer's housekeeping and on nothing else. When your next careful application disappears into quiet, hold open the possibility that no job was waiting at the far end, then give the following evening to one that has a pulse.

## FAQ

### What exactly counts as a ghost job?

A listing for work the employer is not currently trying to fill, whether because the budget was frozen, the role is being kept warm for later, or nobody remembered to take the advert down.

### How many job adverts are ghosts?

Nobody can say precisely, because the figures come from self-reported surveys. One survey of 649 hiring managers, cited by the Stack Overflow blog, found close to 40% said their employer had posted them during the year.

### Can I tell a ghost from a real opening before I apply?

Not with certainty, but you can narrow it. Check the posting date, look for the role on the employer's own careers page, and ask the recruiter who the hiring manager is and whether the headcount is signed off.

### Is it wrong for an employer to run an evergreen advert?

Not if it is labelled honestly. Say in the advert that the listing feeds a talent pool rather than a live vacancy, and applicants can decide for themselves whether to spend the time.


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Source: https://theartofpeople.io/blog/are-ghost-jobs-real-why-companies-post-them