Ghost jobs: how to spot one, and why a 30-day-old posting is not proof

We checked 5,994 live postings: two in three were over 30 days old at companies that are hiring. The ghost job signs that matter, and where the law stands.

A ghost job is a posting with no real hire behind it, or not a soon one. The role is on hold, already filled, or left up to collect resumes. It costs you the hour you spent tailoring an application, and then the weeks you spent waiting for an answer that was never coming.

Most advice on spotting one starts with the date: anything older than 30 or 45 days is suspect. We wanted to know how many real postings that rule catches, so we counted. This article gives the result, the signs that actually separate a ghost job from a slow one, and where the law stands in the US, New York and Ontario as of October 2026.

How old is too old? We checked 5,994 live postings

On October 1, 2026, we pulled every open posting from the public job boards of 23 companies that hire through Greenhouse, an applicant tracking system whose boards publish the date each job was first posted. The companies were Airbnb, Asana, Brex, Cloudflare, Coinbase, Databricks, Datadog, Discord, Dropbox, Duolingo, Elastic, Figma, GitLab, Instacart, Lyft, MongoDB, Okta, Pinterest, Reddit, Robinhood, Samsara, Stripe and Twilio. That gave 5,994 postings.

Here is how many postings each common rule of thumb would flag:

The median age by company ran from 29 days (Robinhood) to 100 days (Databricks). Senior roles, roles with several seats and hard-to-fill specialties stay open for months at companies that clearly do hire.

This sample has limits, and they matter. It is large US tech companies on one applicant tracking system, not the whole market. Some of the old postings may well be resume collectors. And if an employer closes a job and creates a new one, the date resets, so the real ages are, if anything, higher. What the count does show is that age alone cannot tell a ghost job from a slow hire. Two-thirds of postings at these companies would fail the 30-day test.

So treat age as one signal among several. A posting that is old and missing from the company's site and has never closed is a different thing from one that is simply old.

Find the original posting date

Job boards show the date of the latest listing, not of the role. On LinkedIn, a reposted job counts as a new post, so a role open since spring can look a week old. Our article on job postings taken down covers how LinkedIn and Indeed timers work.

The company's own careers page is the better clock. If its links point to greenhouse.io or carry a gh_jid= parameter, you can open https://boards-api.greenhouse.io/v1/boards/COMPANY/jobs in your browser, replacing COMPANY with the name in the board's URL. Each job lists a first_published date. That is how we ran the count above.

The six signs, and how much each one weighs

Our free ghost job checker asks you one question at a time about a posting and scores two risks separately: ghost job and scam. It uses fixed rules that run in your browser, with no AI and nothing sent to us. It cannot check the company for you. It weighs what you know.

These are the six ghost job questions and the points a "yes" adds:

Two to four points gives a medium reading, five or more a high one. No single sign reaches five. A month-old posting on its own moves the reading to medium and stops there, which is the honest answer given the count above. You need at least three of the six answered before the checker will call the risk low, because "I don't know" should not read as good news.

The three heavy signs all point at the same thing: the role exists on job boards but not in the company's own hiring. If it is on the careers page, apply there. That copy is the one the recruiters work from.

Ghost job or scam?

They are different problems, and mixing them up leads to the wrong reaction. A ghost job wastes your time. A scam takes your money or your identity.

The checker keeps the two readings apart, so an old posting with no salary is never scored as fraud. On the scam side, three answers make the risk high on their own, because official guidance says no honest employer does them:

• asking you to pay for anything, such as training, equipment or a "deposit";
• asking for bank details, ID or a Social Security number before any interview;
• a job that consists of depositing checks or reshipping parcels.

The FTC lists the same signs in its job scams guide, and you can report one at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. If any of the three apply, stop replying. Ghost job advice does not apply.

How common are ghost jobs?

Nobody knows precisely, and the most quoted figure is the weakest one.

Greenhouse, an applicant tracking vendor, says that "in any given quarter, 18–22% of the jobs posted on the Greenhouse platform are classified as ghost jobs" (Greenhouse 2024 State of Job Hunting report). It does not say how it classifies them. The Congressional Research Service makes the same point about every such estimate: the firms behind them sell hiring services, and their methods are hard to assess (CRS, "Ghost" Job Postings, April 25, 2025).

Why "openings minus hires" does not count ghost jobs

A figure you will see often takes the government's job openings count, subtracts the number of hires, and calls the gap ghost jobs. In the latest data, that would be 7.1 million openings against 5.2 million hires in August 2026 (BLS JOLTS release, September 29, 2026), so roughly a quarter "never filled".

The subtraction does not work, for two reasons in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' own definitions (JOLTS technical note):

• Openings are a snapshot of positions open on the last business day of the month. Hires are everyone added to payroll during the whole month, including rehires. One is a stock, the other a flow, and a role that takes three months to fill sits in the openings count three times before it shows up once in hires.
• To count as an opening, a specific position must exist, the work must be able to start within 30 days, and the employer must be actively recruiting from outside. The CRS concludes that if employers answer honestly, "the job openings measured in JOLTS are unlikely to be ghost jobs."

So the official data cannot tell you how many ghost jobs there are, in either direction. The ads you see on job boards are not what JOLTS measures.

Why companies post jobs they won't fill

The CRS report lists the usual reasons, and they are mostly unglamorous:

• collecting resumes for a role that may open later;
• looking like a growing company, to investors or to staff;
• showing a wide applicant pool when an internal candidate is already chosen;
• waiting for an exceptional candidate rather than filling a seat.

Many are not deliberate. A budget gets frozen after the ad goes up. Or the employer removes the ad from its own site after a hire, and the copies that aggregators scraped stay online.

Are ghost jobs illegal?

In the US, mostly no. The CRS found that proving a ghost posting deceptive under the FTC Act would be hard, because an employer's intent to hire "is not easily discoverable and may be subjective", and that no bill aimed at ghost postings had been introduced in Congress. We found none on October 1, 2026 either. The rules are coming from states and provinces instead.

The CRS report also describes bills in New Jersey and Kentucky. Ontario's rule has a second half that matters after the interview: many employers there must tell interviewed candidates within 45 days whether a decision was made. Our article on whether ghosting candidates is illegal covers that rule.

The useful part for you is that the statement is in the ad. If you apply in Ontario, look for the line on whether the posting is an existing vacancy. An ad that says there is none has told you it is a resume pool, and you can decide whether that is worth an application. If New York's bill becomes law, its required sentence will be just as easy to find: "This posting is not for a current vacancy but the employer is seeking resumes to review in the future when jobs become available."

What to do with a posting that looks like a ghost job

A high reading does not mean "never apply". It means "do not spend much on it, and do not wait for it".

1. Apply where the role lives. If it is on the careers page, apply there and skip the job board copy.
2. Spend ten minutes, not an hour. Send your standard resume rather than a tailored one, and put the time into postings with fewer signs.
3. Ask one direct question. If you can find the recruiter or hiring manager, ask whether the role is open now and when they plan to fill it. A real team can answer. Our follow-up email templates include a closed-question version that is easy to reply to.
4. Set a date and stop. Give it the same follow-up window as any application, then close it in your tracker and move on.
5. Watch for the repost. If the same ad comes back with a new date, put it next to the one you applied to. Same text means the same opening relisted. A changed title or level means the role changed, which is worth a question. That comparison only works if you kept the original.

Keep the original posting with the HiredFolio extension

That last step is the one people skip. The HiredFolio Chrome extension saves a job from LinkedIn, Indeed or a company careers page into your tracker in one click, with the full description and the date you saved it. When the ad comes down, your copy stays. When it comes back with a fresh date, you have the old text to compare it with and the date you first saw it, which is the date the job board no longer shows.

Save your next job with the HiredFolio Chrome extension

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