How to spot a ghost job: 8 checks before you apply

You have applied to forty jobs and heard nothing back. Some of those silences were competition, and some of them were postings nobody was ever going to fill. Here is how to tell which is which before you spend another evening on a cover letter.

First, the distinction that governs everything below. A ghost job wastes your time and the employer is real. A scam costs you money or your identity and the employer is not real. These eight checks are for the first problem; the twelve red flags are for the second.

1. How long has it been open?

The single most useful number, and the one almost no job site shows you. The average US role takes 42 to 44 days to fill, so a posting past 60 days has outlived the time an ordinary hire takes from advert to signature. Past 180 days, the age alone is the answer.

Where to find it: the employer’s own careers page sometimes dates its postings, and the applicant tracking system behind it usually does. Where a date is shown on an aggregator, treat it with suspicion — a repost, a feed refresh or a syndication run can all reset it. On this board the age is measured from the employer’s own publication date where their system publishes one, and from our first sighting where it does not.

2. Has the same role been posted before?

Search the employer’s own careers page for the job title, then search it here. If the same role in the same city keeps reappearing, you are looking at a standing collection point rather than a vacancy. Three postings of the same role in a year is worth noticing; five is a pattern; twelve is a policy.

A genuine repost exists — a candidate fell through, a team re-opened a seat in the new budget year — which is why one repeat means little and a dozen means a great deal. On a scored posting here, the evidence line reads “This role has been posted 6 times” with the actual count.

3. Does it say it is not a real opening?

Some postings tell you outright, and they are easy to miss because the phrasing is bland. Look for: talent pool, talent community, talent network, general application, speculative application, open application, expression of interest, future opportunities, evergreen requisition, and “we are always hiring”. In German, Initiativbewerbung. In French, candidature spontanée.

Any of these means your CV goes into a pile rather than to a hiring manager with a seat to fill. That is not dishonest of the employer — it is stated on the posting — but it is not the thing you thought you were applying to.

4. Is a location stated?

A posting with no place named anywhere, not even “remote”, is a weak signal on its own and a common companion of the stronger ones. Sometimes it means a genuinely flexible role that nobody wrote up properly. Sometimes it means a requisition that exists to collect applications from everywhere.

Weak signals are worth exactly what they are worth. Treat this as a reason to check the other seven, not as a verdict.

5. Does it actually describe the job?

Two things to look at. First, length and specificity: a few hundred characters of generalities, with nothing about the team, the stack, the product or the first ninety days, is a posting nobody had a reason to write carefully.

Second, and more telling, open two or three other postings from the same employer. If the description is word for word identical across five different roles, it was not written for any of them. A boilerplate requisition template is how a company opens twenty postings in an afternoon.

6. Who actually posted it?

A staffing or recruiting agency posting on behalf of a client is one step further from the person who can say yes. Frequently a real role — agencies fill jobs every day — but the agency has an interest in a full pipeline that outlasts any single vacancy, and you usually cannot tell which client the role is for.

The tell is usually in the employer name, the application domain, or a description that describes “our client” rather than a company.

7. Is it still on the employer’s own board?

This is the strongest check you can run yourself, and it takes a minute. Ignore the link you were sent. Go to the company’s own careers page — find it by searching for the company name and the word careers, not by following a link from the posting — and look for the role in their own list.

If it is not there, the posting you were reading is a copy that outlived its original. Aggregators and reposting sites keep listings alive long after the employer has taken them down, and an application to one of those goes nowhere at all. If it is there, you have confirmed the one thing that matters most: the employer is still advertising it today.

That check is a large part of what this board does automatically. A posting still present in its employer’s listing at a check inside 48 hours is the commonest reason a posting here reads “Actively hiring”.

8. Does it publish a salary range?

Worth the least of the eight, and worth including because so much advice gets it backwards. Most postings publish no salary. In places where pay transparency is not mandated, its absence is the norm rather than a red flag, and treating it as one would condemn the majority of every board on the internet.

The useful version is the other direction: a published range is mild positive evidence. Someone worked out a band, which usually means someone approved a budget.

What none of these can tell you

Be honest about the ceiling. Even with all eight, you cannot see whether anyone is reading the applications, whether the budget has survived the quarter, or whether an internal candidate was chosen three weeks ago. Nobody outside the company can.

And a posting that fails several of these checks does not mean the company is lying. A role can sit open for months because of a hiring freeze or a slow approval, with nobody intending to mislead anyone. What it means is that your application may not get a reply — which is enough to decide where the next hour of your evening goes.

Or let the board do it

Most of these checks are already run on every posting here against the employer’s own board, and the reasoning shown. The agency check is still yours to make: the board does not classify agencies. If you want the method rather than the verdict, the full scoring model is published, thresholds included.

Everything above is free and needs no account, and so is one saved search that emails you daily or weekly. A paid plan adds the bulk version: hide the flagged postings from your results, sort by hiring signal, and keep 25 saved searches with alerts as often as hourly.