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Ghost Job Index

Real Job, or Wallpaper
with a Submit Button?

A field guide to which listings are real, which ones are theater, and how to tell the difference before you burn another Sunday on a cover letter.

2026 Composite Snapshot

Synthesized from Clarify Capital, Columbia Law Review, Revelio Labs, LiveCareer, ResumeBuilder.com & BLS JOLTS

1 in 4
Listings Estimated Fake
Published estimates range from 1 in 7 to 1 in 3 depending on methodology. Nobody, including Congress, has an official number.
4 of 10
Postings That Convert to a Hire
Down from 8 of 10 in 2019, per Columbia Law Review. The ratio has halved in six years.
93%
HR Pros Who Post Ghost Jobs
45% do it regularly, 48% occasionally, 5% only in special circumstances. Just 2% say they never do it — that's the outlier position now, not the norm.
62%
Say One Goal Is Morale, Not Hiring
Among hiring managers whose companies posted fake listings, 62% cite making current staff feel replaceable. It's rarely the only motive.

Sector Ghost Rate

Where the fakes cluster

Not every sector fakes it equally. Some industries post ghost listings as a matter of routine; others mostly don't bother. Here's what's actually documented, and where the data runs out.

Government
~60% of postings, highest of any sector
Worst
Wholesale Trade
Ghost rate passes 50% per Clarify Capital
Worst
Education & Health Services
~50% ghost rate — teacher and healthcare-staffing shortages inflate the count
Worst
Information & Tech
~48% — includes "cream-skimming" for rare AI talent
Bad
Senior-Level Roles (any sector)
Roughly 1 in 5 postings, across industries
Bad
Retail & Hospitality
High turnover masks the picture — treat evergreen listings with suspicion
Average
Professional & Business Services
National average or below — no elevated signal found
Average
Manufacturing
Vacancy gap runs low despite high candidate-reported ghosting
Average
Worst — documented, elevated ghost rate Bad — meaningfully above baseline Average — no reliable sector-specific elevation found
Where a sector shows "average," that's not a clean bill of health — it means no study has isolated a sector-specific rate worth publishing. Assume the national baseline applies and judge each listing on its own merits.

Six Ways to Spot One

Before you spend the hour

01 — Age
Stale and Unedited
Live more than 30 days with no edits. Real urgency doesn't sit quietly for a month.
02 — Missing Salary
No Pay Range Where One's Required
No pay range in a jurisdiction that legally requires salary disclosure is a compliance red flag. It doesn't prove the job is fake — but it's another reason to verify the employer and the opening before investing serious time.
03 — Board-Only
Absent from the Careers Page
Posted on Indeed or LinkedIn but absent from the company's own careers page. Real openings usually live in both places.
04 — Generic Copy
Nobody Wrote This for a Real Hire
No team name, no reporting line, no specifics on what you'd actually do in the first 90 days.
05 — The Repost Loop
Disappears and Reappears
Same listing vanishes and comes back unchanged every few weeks. That's a pipeline being kept warm, not a job being filled.
06 — Total Silence
Not Even an Auto-Reply
No auto-acknowledgment, no rejection, nothing, for weeks. A functioning ATS usually manages at least a form email.

Where the Fog Comes From

Explainable, not necessarily deceptive — and deceptive by design

Not every ghost listing is malicious. Knowing which kind you're looking at tells you whether to wait it out or move on entirely.

Explainable, Not Necessarily Deceptive

  • Compliance-driven listings — covered federal contractors must list most genuine external openings with the appropriate state employment service; roles being filled internally are exempt from that requirement
  • Budget-pending roles — headcount may be approved while actual funding or final authorization is still unsettled
  • Evergreen pipelines — employers in high-turnover fields keep legitimate recruiting pipelines open year-round

Deceptive by Design

  • Growth signaling — 66% of hiring managers whose companies posted fake listings say one purpose was to make the company appear to be growing ResumeBuilder.com, 2024
  • Employee pressure — 62% said one purpose was to make existing employees feel replaceable ResumeBuilder.com, 2024
  • Résumé collection — 59% said fake listings were used to collect résumés and keep them on file for possible future hiring ResumeBuilder.com, 2024

Signal vs. Noise

What it means for you

The job wasn't fake. Your effort was just misdirected.

Start with the number that actually matters here, which isn't 18 percent or 33 percent or any of the other figures different firms have landed on with different methodologies. It's this one: hires per ten postings dropped from eight to four in six years. Even if you're generous and assume half of that gap is normal market friction — budget delays, internal candidates, roles that quietly died after approval — you're still left with a labor market where a meaningful share of what's posted was never going to result in anyone getting hired, full stop.

That reframes the math on your job search. If a quarter of what you're applying to has no real hiring intent behind it, then a portion of your rejections aren't rejections at all — they're silence from a listing that was decoration. The Congressional Research Service, an arm of the federal government, has formally admitted it cannot produce an official ghost-job statistic. If Congress can't count them, you're not going to out-detect them by trying harder. You're going to out-detect them by triaging faster.

Government, wholesale trade, and education/health services carry the worst documented rates — the last of those driven less by deception than by chronic understaffing in teaching and healthcare, where a role can stay technically "open" for months because nobody can find a body to fill it, not because nobody intended to. Tech runs hot for a different reason entirely: companies keeping a listing open indefinitely in case a rare AI candidate wanders past, with zero urgency to fill it otherwise. Same heat-map color, two very different diseases.

Bottom line: don't try to achieve zero ghost jobs in your pipeline — that's not achievable, and chasing it will make you paranoid about real listings too. Run the six-flag check before you invest real time, deprioritize anything that trips three or more, and put your energy into companies and roles where the posting looks like it was written by someone who actually needs the help.

Source Note

Where these numbers actually came from

LiveCareer, "HR Professionals Admit to Posting Ghost Jobs" — survey of 918 HR professionals conducted March 25, 2025.

ResumeBuilder.com, "3 in 10 Companies Currently Have Fake Job Postings Listed" — 2024 survey of hiring managers; 649 respondents whose companies had posted fake job listings completed the full survey.

U.S. Department of Labor, VEVRAA guidance — covered federal contractors must list most external employment openings with the appropriate employment service, with specified exemptions including jobs filled internally.

State pay-transparency requirements vary by jurisdiction. Massachusetts, for example, has required covered employers with 25 or more employees to disclose pay ranges in job postings since October 29, 2025.

Clarify Capital, Ghost Jobs Study (2026) — employer survey on posting intent. Columbia Law Review, labor market analysis (November 2025) — hires-per-posting ratio decline, citing Revelio Labs data. Congressional Research Service, "Ghost Job Postings" (2025) — official federal acknowledgment of the phenomenon and its data limits. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, JOLTS (May 2026).