You spent an hour tailoring your resume, wrote a cover letter, and clicked apply. Weeks later: silence. No rejection. No interview. The listing is still live. You start to wonder whether anyone was ever going to read it.
That suspicion is often correct. A meaningful share of online job postings are ghost jobs—openings advertised with little or no intention to hire.
This is not the same as a scam listing designed to steal your data. Ghost jobs come from real companies. The role may have been real once, or it may never have been. The posting stays up anyway.
What counts as a ghost job
A ghost job is a vacancy that looks open to the outside world but is not backed by an active hiring decision. Sometimes the budget got cut. Sometimes the team changed direction. Sometimes—and this is the part that frustrates candidates most—the company never meant to fill the role at all.
Researchers define the phenomenon similarly. An October 2024 working paper by Hunter Ng at Baruch College describes ghost hiring as advertising openings without an immediate or reasonably foreseeable vacancy, and estimates that up to 21% of job ads may fit that pattern. Hiring platform Greenhouse reports that 18–22% of jobs posted on its platform in any given quarter are classified as ghost jobs. Those numbers come from different methods, but they point the same direction: this is not a fringe behavior.
Growth theater for leadership and investors
One of the clearest motives is optics. Posting roles makes a company look like it is expanding even when headcount is flat or shrinking.
In a May 2024 survey of 649 hiring managers commissioned by Resume Builder, 66% of companies that posted fake listings said they did so to make the company appear to be growing. 67% said they wanted to appear open to external talent. When hiring managers were asked where the idea originated, 37% pointed to HR, 29% to senior management, and 25% to executives.
That matches what you see in coverage of the trend. CNBC reported that hiring managers believe advertising nonexistent openings can signal faster growth to leadership and investors. Greenhouse co-founder Jon Stross told CNBC that some businesses post ghost jobs specifically to signal growth to employees, investors, or the public.
For a stretched team, a wall of open reqs can read like relief is coming. For a board deck, it can read like momentum. Neither requires anyone to actually make an offer.
Job boards as almost-free advertising
The second piece is economics. Posting a job online is cheap compared to almost any other form of employer branding.
The Baruch College paper notes that ghost hiring may persist partly because of the low marginal cost of posting additional job ads—employers face little financial deterrent to keeping listings active. Resume Builder’s survey backs up the distribution side: among companies that posted fake jobs, listings appeared on the company website (72%), LinkedIn (70%), ZipRecruiter (58%), Indeed (49%), and Glassdoor (48%).
You get company name visibility, a careers-page signal, and search presence across major portals for the price of a few clicks. Many boards offer free or low-cost tiers. Even paid sponsorship is often cheaper than a proper brand campaign. A live job ad does double duty: it looks like recruiting and it functions like advertising.
That is why ghost jobs cluster on public boards rather than staying internal. The audience is the point.
What the surveys say about scale
Resume Builder found that 40% of hiring managers said their company posted a fake job listing in the past year, and three in ten companies had at least one active fake listing at the time of the survey. Those figures come from a self-reported sample, so treat them as a directional signal rather than a census—but the scale is large enough to matter.
Other motivations show up in the same data:
- 63% wanted overworked employees to believe help was on the way
- 62% wanted staff to feel replaceable
- 59% wanted to collect resumes for later
Disturbingly, 7 in 10 hiring managers in that survey considered posting fake jobs morally acceptable, and 68% reported a positive impact on revenue from the practice. Whether that revenue impact is real or perceived, it explains why the behavior persists.
On the candidate side, Greenhouse found that three in five job seekers suspect they have encountered a ghost job, and 61% have been ghosted after an interview—a separate but related trust problem.
The cost falls on candidates and honest employers
Ghost jobs waste time that job seekers do not have. Applications, portfolio tweaks, and interview prep all carry a cost. Academic research on the topic links ghost hiring to job search fatigue and argues it can distort labor market signals—including the vacancy statistics policymakers use. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ JOLTS survey counts openings based on employer reports; a posted ad can qualify even when no hire is planned.
For companies that actually are hiring, the environment gets harder. Real roles compete for attention with listings that will never close. Strong candidates learn to distrust what they see online. That hurts teams posting legitimate openings too.
What hiring teams that mean it should do differently
If you are recruiting for real, ghost-job culture is an argument for running a tighter, more visible process—not for posting more noise.
A few practical habits:
- Post only roles with budget and a named hiring manager. If the req is exploratory, say so or keep it off public boards.
- Close or pause listings when the search stops. A stale ad is indistinguishable from a ghost job from the outside.
- Reply, even with a no. Candidates remember silence longer than rejection.
Small teams especially benefit from keeping postings aligned with reality. You do not have a brand budget to burn trust.
Canvider JobCraft helps here in a narrow way: turn a real brief into a complete job post quickly, so you are not tempted to leave placeholder listings live while someone finds time to write copy. When you do publish, applications land in one pipeline—easier to close the req when the role is filled instead of letting it drift.
The uncomfortable takeaway
Ghost jobs are not a glitch in the job market. For many organizations they are a deliberate strategy—growth signaling for leadership, visibility on job boards, resume banking, and internal pressure on existing staff. The marginal cost is low. The moral cost to candidates is high.
If you are job hunting, skepticism about listings that never move is rational. If you are hiring, the counter-move is boring and effective: fewer posts, faster closes, and honest communication.
When you are ready to run recruiting without the theater, get started free.