{"id":1072,"date":"2026-07-26T17:24:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-26T11:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastroundai.com\/blog\/?p=1072"},"modified":"2026-07-21T22:32:44","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T17:02:44","slug":"ghost-jobs-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastroundai.com\/blog\/ghost-jobs-2026","title":{"rendered":"Ghost Jobs: How to Spot Listings That Will Never Hire You"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pennsylvania’s state legislature introduced a bill in March 2026 that would fine employers for posting a listing when they have no plan to fill it, the exact behavior job seekers have been calling a ghost job for the past two years. New Jersey, California, and Kentucky have near-identical bills moving through their own statehouses this year, and two similar ones already passed the New York State Senate. Lawmakers don’t usually spend a session writing rules about hiring etiquette. They do when enough voters start emailing about it.<\/p>\n

A ghost job is a posting for a role that isn’t actually open, whether it never was or it quietly stopped being one after somebody got hired internally. You apply anyway, because nothing in the listing tells you the difference from your side of the screen. This is a plain guide to what the real survey data says about how often that happens, the signals that do give it away, and where a tool can (and can’t) help you skip one.<\/p>\n

Why Would a Company Post a Job It Isn’t Trying to Fill?<\/h2>\n

Mostly to look good, not to trick you specifically. In a ResumeBuilder.com survey of 1,641 hiring managers<\/a>, 67% said their company posts jobs to appear open to outside talent even when it isn’t hiring, 66% said it’s meant to signal growth, and 59% admitted the listing exists just to collect resumes for whenever a real opening shows up.<\/p>\n

Fake job postings aren’t a rare accident, either. That same survey found 40% of hiring managers say their company posted at least one this year, and 3 in 10 say a fake listing is sitting live on their careers page right now, as you’re reading this. Two-thirds also copped to a less flattering reason: keeping current staff quietly aware that they’re replaceable, so nobody complains too loudly about workload.<\/p>\n

The part of that same data that stood out to me most: 68% of the hiring managers said the practice had a positive effect on revenue, 77% said it helped productivity, and 65% said it helped morale. Almost nobody in that survey thinks ghost jobs are backfiring on the company posting them. That’s a big part of why they keep showing up.<\/p>\n

How Common Is This, Actually?<\/h2>\n

Numbers on this vary more than they should, and it’s worth knowing why before repeating any single one of them. Different sources are measuring different things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n
Source<\/th>\nWhat it measured<\/th>\nEstimate<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
ResumeBuilder.com (1,641 hiring managers, self-report)<\/td>\nCompanies with an active fake listing right now<\/td>\n3 in 10 (about 30%)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Greenhouse (internal ATS platform data)<\/td>\nListings on the Greenhouse platform classified as ghost jobs, per quarter<\/td>\n18% to 22%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Greenhouse (2,500 candidates surveyed)<\/td>\nCandidates who suspect they’ve hit a ghost job themselves<\/td>\n3 in 5 (60%)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

The gap between 20% and 60% isn’t really a contradiction. Greenhouse’s platform figure is close to a hard count, pulled from actual postings sitting in actual ATS accounts. The 60% is a feeling: candidates guessing, after the fact, that a role they applied to probably wasn’t real. Greenhouse’s own 2024 report<\/a> puts both numbers side by side without pretending they measure the same thing, which is more honest than most coverage of this topic manages.<\/p>\n

Forbes reported in May 2026<\/a> that a separate 2024 survey of 753 U.S. recruiters by MyPerfectResume found eight in 10 privately admitting their own company posts jobs that are already filled or never existed, and 17% said as many as three-quarters of their postings are fake. Read that next to the 40% from ResumeBuilder and the range stops looking like noise and starts looking like a floor.<\/p>\n

My honest read, and I could be wrong about this since it doesn’t show up in anyone’s survey data: the reposting pattern on a specific listing tells you more than any of these top-line percentages will. A candidate’s gut instinct after staring at the same “urgent hire” badge for the third month running is usually right, even when it can’t cite a source.<\/p>\n

How to Spot a Ghost Job Before You Waste an Evening on It<\/h2>\n

None of these signals is proof by itself. Stacked together, they get reliable fast.<\/p>\n