Not every job posting represents an open job. That sounds like the kind of thing said by someone burned out on a long search and looking for something to blame. It isn't. It's a measurable, well-documented pattern with its own name: ghost jobs, listings for roles that don't currently exist, were filled months ago, or were never seriously intended to be filled at all.
The scale of it is larger than most job seekers assume. One widely cited estimate puts the share of ghost listings on LinkedIn at roughly 27 percent, more than one in four. The numbers from the employer side line up with that: in one survey, about 81 percent of recruiters admitted to having posted a listing with no immediate intent to fill it, and separate research found that roughly four in ten companies posted at least one fake listing over the past year. Put those together and the picture is consistent rather than contradictory: this isn't a handful of bad actors, it's routine practice at a meaningful share of companies.
Why companies do this on purpose
The honest answer is rarely malicious, more often it's organizational. Companies that admit to posting ghost jobs tend to give a small, repeatable set of reasons. Some want to project growth to investors, customers, or their own staff, since an open req signals momentum even when nobody is actively interviewing for it. Some are quietly building a pipeline for a role they expect to need in six or twelve months, so resumes are already on file once the budget clears. And some are managing morale on an already stretched team: a posting goes up because people need to believe help is coming, whether or not headcount has actually been approved. None of these are edge cases. Each one shows up often enough in surveys of recruiters to count as a normal part of how postings get created, not an exception to it.
The cost isn't evenly split
None of those reasons make the experience less frustrating from the other side of the application. Posting a listing costs a company almost nothing: a form, a few fields, maybe a fee to a job board. Applying to one costs a candidate real time, tailoring a resume, writing a cover letter, sometimes completing a screening questionnaire that takes twenty minutes on its own. A real listing and a ghost listing look identical from the outside, which means candidates absorb the full cost of a mismatch they had no way to see coming. Some of what looks like a ghost job is also just an artifact of automation: applicant tracking systems that quietly repost or bump a listing's date without anyone reviewing whether the role is actually still open. That's a less deliberate version of the same problem, but the effect on a candidate's time is identical either way.
Signals worth checking before you invest hours
There's no foolproof test, but a handful of signals correlate with listings that aren't actively being filled:
- The posting date is old, sometimes by weeks or months, with no indication it was refreshed for a real reason
- The description is vague or reads like a template, with nothing specific about the team, the manager, or the actual problem the role solves
- There's no named hiring manager or team, just a generic HR inbox or company-wide contact
- The same role gets reposted every few weeks under a slightly different title
- The language leans on evergreen phrases like always hiring or growing team instead of anything specific to a current opening
None of these signals is proof by itself. Companies legitimately keep some roles open on a rolling basis for hard-to-fill positions, and a vague description is sometimes just bad writing rather than bad faith. But when several of these show up on the same posting, it's reasonable to spend limited time and attention somewhere else.
None of this means job seekers should stop applying to postings that look slightly stale. It means calibrating expectations. Silence after an application isn't always a verdict on the resume that was sent. Sometimes there was never a real decision to be made in the first place.