A ghost job is a job posting that stays up even though the company isn't really trying to fill it right now, maybe because the role is already filled, on hold, or is only there to collect resumes. You can't prove any single listing is a ghost from the outside, but a posting that's been open for months, keeps getting re-posted, and never leads to a human conversation is a strong signal to spend your energy elsewhere.
I'm Dhrumil, the founder of Jobfinder AI. Our product reads live job postings straight from company hiring systems every day, so we can see something most job seekers can't: when a posting went up, how long it stayed up, and whether it came back. This piece shares what that data shows, plainly, along with its limits.
Key numbers from our data
These numbers come from postings we pulled directly from employer hiring systems (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Recruitee, BambooHR and Keka), using the publish date the employer's own system reports. Snapshot date: October 14, 2026.
- 79,279 postings were open on those systems on the day we measured.
- The median open posting had been live for 76 days. For postings in the US, the median was 64 days.
- 73% of open postings had been up for 30 days or more, 57% for 60 days or more, and 45% for 90 days or more.
- About 1 in 4 open postings (26%) had been up for six months or more, and 12% for over a year.
- In the US, 40% of open postings had been live for 90 days or more, and 20% for six months or more.
- Most new postings do not close quickly. Of 9,806 postings we watched from the day they went up in late August and early September 2026, only 20% closed within two weeks, and 63% were still open after 30 days. For US postings, 68% were still open at 30 days.
- Re-posting is real but not the norm. Of 23,651 postings that closed between late August and the end of September, 9.6% came back as a new posting with the same title, at the same company, in the same country. 4.5% came back within three days.
- On Workday career sites, 39% of open postings carried Workday's own "Posted 30+ Days Ago" label (36% for US postings), across about 47,000 open Workday postings.
A long-open posting is common, not rare, and many are perfectly real: hard-to-fill specialist jobs and "always hiring" roles. But when nearly half of the board has been up for three months or more, a lot of applications land where nobody is actively reading.
What is a ghost job?
A ghost job is a listing that looks like an open role but isn't backed by an active plan to hire someone soon. The common versions:
- The filled role nobody took down. Someone was hired, often internally, and the posting just stayed up.
- The paused role. Budget got frozen, but the listing is still live.
- The pipeline posting. The company wants a stack of resumes "for when we're ready."
- The signaling posting. The listing exists to make the company look like it's growing, or to show current staff that help is on the way.
This isn't a fringe idea. In a Resume Builder survey of hiring managers launched in May 2024, 40% said their company had posted a fake job in the past year, and 3 in 10 said their company had a fake listing up at that moment. Greenhouse, one of the hiring systems we pull from, reported in December 2024 that in any given quarter, 18% to 22% of jobs posted on its platform are classified as ghost jobs, and that three in five candidates suspect they've run into one.
How to spot a ghost job: a checklist
No single sign proves a job is fake. Look for several together.
- It's been up a long time. Check the original posting date on the company's own careers page, not the repost date on a job board. In our data, the median open posting is about two and a half months old. Past 90 days, be skeptical. Past six months, assume it's either very hard to fill or not really active.
- It keeps coming back. If the same title at the same company disappears and reappears every few weeks, that can mean the role is hard to fill, or that the listing is being refreshed to look new. In our data, about 1 in 10 closed postings came back under the same title.
- The description is generic. No team name, no manager, no specific project, no clear first-90-days work. Real openings usually have someone who needs a specific problem solved.
- There's no salary range where one is expected. Several US states, including California, Colorado, New York and Washington, require pay ranges in job postings. A missing range doesn't prove anything, but it's one more thing to weigh.
- The company is in a hiring freeze or just had layoffs. If the news says they cut 10% of staff last month, an evergreen "we're growing" listing deserves a second look.
- Nobody can tell you who the hiring manager is. If you can't find anyone on the team, and the recruiter goes quiet when you ask, that's a signal.
- You applied weeks ago and heard nothing. Silence is common in hiring, so this is weak alone, but combined with an old posting date it tells you where to stop spending time.
Why do companies post ghost jobs?
Most ghost jobs aren't evil schemes. They're usually a mix of process gaps and mixed motives:
- Nobody owns taking the listing down. Hiring systems often keep a role open until someone manually closes it. When the hire happens internally or the budget gets pulled, closing the posting is the last thing anyone thinks about.
- Evergreen pipelines. Some companies always want a bench of candidates for roles they fill often. The posting is real in the sense that they'll hire eventually, but not in the sense that someone is reviewing your application this week.
- Looking healthy. In the Resume Builder survey, 66% of hiring managers whose companies posted fake jobs said it was to make the company look like it was growing, and 63% said it was to convince employees their workload would get lighter.
- Leverage and benchmarking. Posting a role can show what the market looks like, or signal to current staff that they're replaceable. In the same survey, 62% cited making employees feel replaceable.
From our data, the platform matters too. Postings on Ashby, which is popular with startups, closed fastest: only 58% were still open at 30 days, and the median open Ashby posting was 55 days old. Greenhouse postings stayed open longest early on, with 79% still open at 30 days. Different tools have different defaults for when a role gets closed, so these gaps partly reflect software, not just intent.
How long do job postings stay open?
Here's the distribution of how long the 79,279 open postings had been live on October 14, 2026:
- 0 to 6 days: 4.7%
- 7 to 13 days: 7.3%
- 14 to 29 days: 14.6%
- 30 to 59 days: 16.5%
- 60 to 89 days: 12.0%
- 90 to 179 days: 19.2%
- 180 to 364 days: 13.6%
- 365 days or more: 12.1%
Only about a quarter of what's open at any moment is less than a month old.
By type of role, marketing and data jobs were the "freshest": a median of 61 and 58 days, with 37% and 38% open for 90 days or more. Engineering and healthcare postings ran older, with medians of 82 and 83 days and 47% and 48% open for 90 days or more. That fits what we'd expect. Specialist engineering and clinical roles are genuinely hard to fill, so long-open postings there are more often real.
By market, US postings ran younger than the rest of our data: a median of 64 days versus 77 days elsewhere.
Ghost jobs on LinkedIn and Indeed
LinkedIn and Indeed mostly display jobs that come from somewhere else: a company's careers page, an applicant tracking system, or a staffing agency. That creates two extra layers where a ghost can live.
- The source posting stays open, so the board keeps showing it. Everything in our data above flows straight through to the big boards.
- The board shows a refreshed date. A listing can look "new" on a board because it was re-syndicated, even when the company's own system shows it went up months ago.
- Reposts reset the clock. If a company closes and re-opens the same role, boards treat it as a brand new job.
The practical move: when a role on LinkedIn or Indeed interests you, click through to the company's own careers page. Check whether the role is still there and when it was first posted. If the careers page doesn't have it at all, don't spend an hour on a tailored application.
How many job postings are ghost jobs?
The honest answer is that nobody knows the exact share, us included. Here's what can be said with evidence:
- Greenhouse says 18% to 22% of jobs posted on its platform in a given quarter are classified as ghost jobs.
- Resume Builder found 3 in 10 hiring managers said their company had a fake listing active at the time of their survey.
- In our data, 45% of open postings had been live for 90 days or more. That is not the share of ghost jobs. It's the share of listings old enough that you should check before investing real effort.
So a reasonable working assumption is that somewhere around one in five postings may not be backed by active hiring, and a much larger group is old enough that a cold application will probably sit unread.
What to do instead
Ghost jobs are frustrating mostly because they waste your best hours. A few habits help:
- Sort by freshness. Prioritize roles first posted in the last two to three weeks, checked on the company's own site.
- Spend less on the form, more on the person. For any role you really want, find the hiring manager or team lead and send a short, specific note. A real person can tell you in one line whether the role is active, which a posting never will.
- Use stale postings as leads, not applications. An old posting still tells you a team needs this skill. A direct note asking whether they're still looking costs five minutes.
This is the reason we built Jobfinder AI. It finds roles that fit you, applies, and then emails the hiring manager directly from your own inbox, so your application has a path to a real person instead of only a portal. We can't promise any company will reply, and nobody honest can, but it means you're no longer relying on a listing that may not be watched.
Frequently asked questions
What is a ghost job?
A ghost job is a posting that stays up even though the company isn't actively trying to hire for it soon. It may already be filled, frozen, or used to collect resumes or signal growth.
Are ghost jobs illegal?
In most of the US, posting a job without an immediate plan to hire is not illegal on its own. Lawmakers have started to pay attention to the practice, so it's worth watching, but today it mostly falls into a gray area rather than a clear violation.
How long is too long for a job posting to be open?
There's no fixed line. In our data, the median open posting was 76 days old. Past 90 days, check that the role is still active before you apply, and past six months, assume it's either very hard to fill or not truly open.
How can I tell if a job posting on LinkedIn or Indeed is real?
Click through to the company's own careers page and check the role is listed there and when it was first posted. Then look for a named hiring manager or team and reach out directly to ask whether the role is active.
Why do companies keep re-posting the same job?
Often because the role is genuinely hard to fill, or because the hiring system closes and re-opens roles on a schedule. Sometimes it's to make a listing look fresh. In our data, about 1 in 10 closed postings came back with the same title at the same company.
Should I still apply to an old job posting?
You can, but keep it cheap. Skip the hour-long tailored application and send a short note to the hiring manager instead. If the role is real, that note is more likely to reach someone than a form.
How we measured this
Data source. Jobfinder AI pulls live postings from employers' own hiring systems every day. For this study we used six systems that publish an employer-stated "first published" or "posted" date for every job: Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Recruitee, BambooHR and Keka. That covered 79,279 open postings on October 14, 2026. We also looked separately at about 47,000 open Workday postings, using Workday's own "Posted N Days Ago" label, because Workday does not expose an exact date. We excluded job aggregators because we can't see when those jobs actually close.
Days live. For open postings, days live is the time from the employer's stated publish date to October 14, 2026. If an employer edits a posting in a way that resets that date, we'll undercount its age.
Still open at 30 days. We only trust our "closed" signal from late August 2026 onward, when we started reliably checking each company's full listing on every pass. So the 30-day figures use postings first published between August 25 and September 13, 2026 that we saw within three days of going live (9,806 postings, 3,252 in the US). A posting counts as closed when it disappears from the company's live listing. We did not have enough history to measure 60 and 90 day survival this way, so the 60 and 90 day numbers on this page come from the age of currently open postings instead.
Re-posts. A re-post is a new posting, with a different URL, at the same company, with the same title and the same country list, that first appeared after the earlier posting closed. Matching is on exact title text, so small wording changes are missed, and different cities in the same country are counted as the same location.
Role families and markets. Role families come from our own classifier, which leaves some postings unclassified. Markets come from the location on the posting. Remote postings without a country are grouped separately.
Limits, plainly. None of these numbers prove that any posting is fake. A role open for 90 days can be completely real, especially for specialist or high-volume hiring. Our data covers the companies and hiring systems we track, not the whole job market, and it leans toward tech and startup employers. What the data does show is how often listings outlive the urgent stage of hiring, which is the part job seekers can act on.