If you have been applying for many jobs but haven’t landed any interviews, it is quite likely that the positions that you are applying for do not exist in the first place. Ghost jobs, or postings for jobs that don’t actually exist, have been on the rise and they are wasting prospective workers thousands and thousands of hours.

Things have been particularly troublesome in the tech industry which is anyways witnessing a severe downturn with leading tech companies firing thousands of employees since late 2022. Here we’ll discuss why companies post these ghost jobs and how prospective workers can identify and deal with these.

What Are Ghost Jobs and How Acute Is the Problem?

Ghost jobs are fake job listings but they aren’t exactly scams, even though the company posting that job has no intention of hiring workers for that position (at least immediately). They waste your time, not your money.

Ghost jobs are surprisingly prevalent on platforms like LinkedIn. Various surveys have shown the severity of the problem. For instance, in a MyPerfectResume survey earlier this year, 81% of recruiters said that they posted job ads for roles that were either already filled or that positions did not exist at all.

A May survey from Resume Builder showed that 40% of companies posted a fake job listing in 2024 and 3 out of 10 had an active fake listing at the time of the survey.

That survey had some interesting insights on ghost jobs. It showed that in 37% of the cases, the idea to post a fake job came from the HR department while senior management was the second biggest culprit with 29%. In 25% of the cases, the idea to post a ghost job came from executives with investors behind 5% of such jobs.

Resume Builder’s Chief Career Advisor Stacie Haller said, “It’s a concerning scenario, particularly when these misleading postings originate from HR departments — the very entities entrusted with shaping accurate perceptions of their organizations.”

Number of Hires Per Job Posted Has Halved in Five Years

One need not look at the surveys as data shows how deep-rooted the problem is. For instance, analysis done by Revelio Labs, a US-based workforce intelligence company, shows that in 2019 there were eight hires for every 10 job postings. However, that number has halved to four hires per 10 job postings. This basically means that the number of hires per job posting has halved over the last five years. While there could be other factors attributable to the trend, many of these postings were likely for ghost jobs.

Why Do Recruiters Post Ghost Jobs

The very idea of recruiters posting a fake job might be perplexing as it defies logic. After all, why spend time, effort, and even money on a ghost job? However, there are many reasons companies post fake jobs.

The Resume Builder survey showed that 67% of companies post a ghost job to show they are open to external talent while 66% do so to signal that they are growing and are hence hiring more people. 63% of companies post fake jobs to give a false sense of relief to overworked employees while 62% do so to give a signal to employees that they are replaceable. 59% of the surveyed companies said that they post a fake job opening just to collect resumes and build a database of prospects for any future job opening.

Notably, 68% of the participants in the survey said that posting ghost jobs had a positive impact on the company’s revenues while 77% said they had a positive impact on productivity. As strange as it sounds, it seems like these fake listings are actually quite profitable.

What’s worrying is the fact that 43% of hiring managers believe that posting a fake job is “definitely acceptable” while another 27% think it is “probably acceptable.” With seven in 10 recruiters finding posting a ghost job morally acceptable we can be reasonably sure that things are not getting better – or at least any time soon.

Fake Jobs Can Be a Nuisance for Job Seekers

Meanwhile, while companies see several benefits of posting a ghost job, these fake opportunities are a major nuisance for job seekers which takes away a lot of their efforts and is also demoralizing. Many prospective workers are struggling to even get interviews, despite applying to dozens of roles. This can be extremely demoralizing, especially if you don’t know about the prevalence of ghost jobs. Instead, they may think that they are underqualified.

As Irene Nexica, a career coach and tech recruiter, told SFGATE “In today’s market, they are already spending a lot of time researching and customizing their applications.” Nexica added, “So the idea of doing even more work to find out if the job listing is real freaks people out, and I’m seeing a lot of demoralized people who are still compelled to apply for financial reasons.”

How to Spot a Ghost Job

According to Resume Builder’s Haller, if a job was posted several months back there is a high chance that it is fake. She advises job seekers to look for more recent jobs that were posted within the last few weeks. Naturally, you will likely still run into a few recent fake job listings too.

Secondly, she advises to also look for the job advertisement on a company’s website. Haller advises applying for the job directly on the company’s website if it is listed there instead of applying on third-party portals like LinkedIn. Finally, she says that job seekers should also use the contact details of the hiring manager posted along with the job posting and send them an email mentioning that they applied for a job.

Furthermore, job seekers should follow some basic hygiene to identify a real job posting from a ghost job. For instance, job descriptions can be a good starting point as a posting with vague or generic descriptions has a high likelihood of being a fake job. Alternatively, growing your network can help you approach companies and recruiters directly which would largely address the issue of ghost jobs.

Meanwhile, with companies coming up with innovative ways – and some like Wells Fargo even conducting sham interviews – job seekers can’t really do much. This especially holds true when the job market, particularly for tech workers, is becoming increasingly difficult with more applicants than actual jobs.