What is a ghost job?
A job posting nobody intends to fill. Here is how many there are on the boards we track, how we tell, and how to check one yourself.
What is a ghost job?
A ghost job is a real posting from a real company that nobody intends to fill right now — left open to collect CVs, to look like growth, or because nobody closed it after a hiring freeze. It is not a scam. The company exists and the posting is genuine; the opening is not.
Every posting on this board is scored for it, using the one thing a job board can measure and a job seeker cannot: how that posting has behaved over time. Not its wording — its history.
Why we can measure this
Most ghost-job tools read the text of one posting and judge it on its wording — whether the responsibilities sound vague, whether a salary is missing. That is a guess about a document.
We crawl employers’ own applicant tracking systems directly, every day, and we have been doing it long enough to have a history for each posting. So we can tell you a role has been open 259 days, that this employer has posted it six times in a year, and that we checked their board this morning. That is a measurement, and you can check every part of it yourself.
How every posting here is scored
We crawl
Applicant tracking systems, read directly from the employer's own board rather than scraped from an aggregator.
We watch
Every posting, every day: is it still listed, has the same role been posted before, did it ever close?
We score
Days open, reposts, and whether that employer ever closes a role. No AI guessing about wording.
Found a job somewhere else? Check it before you apply.
Two different problems, two different checks. Both free, no account needed.
Questions
- What is a ghost job?
- A job posting for a role that nobody intends to fill right now. The company is real and the posting is genuine — it is left open to collect CVs, to look like the company is growing, or because nobody closed it after a hiring freeze.
- How can you tell?
- By watching, not by reading. Other tools judge a posting from its wording. We crawl employers' own applicant tracking systems every day, so we can see how long a posting has been open, how many times that employer has posted the same role, and whether they ever close anything.
- Is a ghost job the same as a job scam?
- No, and treating them as one thing is the commonest mistake. A ghost job wastes your time; the employer is real. A scam costs you money or your identity; the employer is not real. They need different checks, which is why we have two.
- Do you hide ghost jobs from the board?
- No. Every posting is shown and every posting is scored, for everyone, free. A paid plan lets you filter the flagged ones out and sort by hiring signal — but nothing is ever hidden from you.
- Is the checker free?
- Yes. Both checkers are free and need no account.
The research
The figures above are ours, measured from our own corpus. These are everyone else’s, and they are what made us build this.
- 18–22%
- of US job postings are ghost jobs — Greenhouse, 2025
- 93%
- of HR professionals admit to posting them — LiveCareer, 918 respondents, 2025
- 17.6%
- of live ATS postings are open past 60 days — Four-Leaf, 149,008 postings, 2026
- 42–44
- days is the average time to fill a US role — SHRM
Browse jobs scored for ghost-job risk →
Every posting, scored, free. Nothing is hidden from you.