How common are ghost jobs, and how do you spot one?

The honest answer is that nobody outside a company can see its intentions, so every estimate is a proxy. Some studies ask hiring managers to admit it. Some ask job seekers what they suspect. One counts postings that never led to a hire, which also catches jobs that were simply hard to fill. They are not measuring the same thing, and you should not average them.

If you want one number to keep in your head, Greenhouse's is the most grounded, because it comes from what employers actually did on its platform rather than what anyone remembered in a survey: roughly one posting in five. That fits with Revelio's finding that about half of postings did not end in a hire, since a chunk of the unfilled half is real jobs that went nowhere for ordinary reasons.

Some of those reasons are cynical, and the same survey found 7 in 10 of the hiring managers thought posting fake jobs was acceptable. But a lot of ghosting is duller than that. A role gets approved, posted, then frozen when the budget changes, and nobody takes the ad down. An internal candidate is already lined up, but policy says the job must be advertised. A company keeps a permanent "talent pipeline" post open; CareerPlug, which sells hiring software to small businesses, openly suggests posting a job labelled as a "future opening" so you can accept applications all year. And when a role is filled, the employer's own copy usually comes down, while the copies scraped onto other sites can stay up for weeks.

That is why it helps to think of ghost jobs as a range rather than a yes or no.

So age alone won't catch them. Most fake listings in that survey were kept up for a month or less, which is about how long plenty of real jobs stay open too. Age is still the best single clue you have, because the odds shift as a posting gets older. Clarify Capital's survey put it plainly:

Job seekers have worked this out on their own. In Resume Builder's August 2026 survey, the most common warning sign people cited (38%) was a listing that stayed up too long or stayed up after being filled, and 34% pointed to roles that kept getting taken down and reposted.

One caution about step 2: finding the posting on the employer's own system tells you the employer still has it up, not that they mean it. Greenhouse's 18 to 22% figure came from employers' own postings on its platform. Most postings in our feed arrive through job boards and aggregators rather than straight from those systems, as the chart shows, which is exactly why matching a listing back to its source is worth the two minutes.

In most places, no. Ontario is the clearest exception. Since January 1, 2026, covered employers there must say in a public job posting whether it is for an existing vacancy, and must tell anyone they interviewed whether a hiring decision has been made within 45 days of the last interview (Ontario's guide to the Employment Standards Act). The same guide says employers with fewer than 25 employees on the day the job is posted are exempt.

In the US, ghost-job bills have been introduced in several states, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania among them. We haven't confirmed that any of them is in force, so check with your state's labor department before you rely on one.

We don't run a ghost-job detector, and we'd be suspicious of anyone who says they can tell from the outside which postings are fake. What we do is more modest. Every job card shows how many days ago the job was posted and links to where it is posted, so you can run the checks above in a click. We also leave known reposting aggregators and staffing spam out of the cards: in the 30 days to November 7, 2026 that was about 8,500 postings, roughly 1 in 20 of everything that came in. If you are hunting specifically for jobs that sit on company systems, our guides to the hidden job market and ATS job search go further.