What, exactly, is a ‘ghost job’?

While building out our tools, we’ve done a lot of work on measuring the quality of jobs, creating extra info that may help jobseekers related to individual jobs (for example, estimating skills that would be useful, even where those aren’t mentioned by employers), and filtering out jobs that we believe are very low quality.

In some cases, we filter out a category of job that have become known as “Ghost Jobs”…

The term “Ghost Jobs” is more fun in name than the actual phenomenon: Job ads that look like they’re for real jobs, while in reality those jobs don’t exist, or at least aren’t hiring right now.

What are ghost jobs:

• Job ads with no real intention to hire at all, or at least not to hire immediately
• Job ads where the job has already been filled, but is kept live for appearance, or for future pipeline, or other reasons internal to the hiring company
• They’re not always malicious, but they’re frequently misleading

Why companies post “ghost jobs”

Though ghost jobs waste candidates’ time, and are somewhat counterproductive overall for companies, there are several reasons recruiters put them out there.

Building out CV or Candidate Pipelines

Sometimes companies have a rough idea they’ll have a big hiring period coming up, or have a rough need to constantly replace people in particular roles. Rather than waiting until they have an absolute definite need, they get ahead by posting job ads to build out their pipeline. Then, when the point comes that they actually do need to hire, they dip into that pool of CVs and candidates, and can recruit a little more quickly.

The first problem, of course, with this, is firstly that the timelines are not fully known – it could be roles become available within a few weeks, or could be months. The second problem is that companies change their needs. It may be that they harvest thousands of CVs for a particular role, and then their strategy shifts and there’s no need to actually recruit. In other words: It was worth the risk to them, as they could have moved quickly if they needed, but in doing so they created collateral damage in wasting the time of thousands of candidates.

To signal growth to investors or competitors or the wider market

You’re an investor in a company, or you’re a competitor of a particular company. What’s a better sign for you that they’re doing well:

1. They’re actively posting job openings
2. They’ve suddenly stopped all hiring

Obviously, the first one. In general, companies actively hiring (particularly if the number and breadth of open roles increases) looks like a business in growth mode, investing more in talent to increase their future revenues. It’s not universally the case, but a company that suddenly stops hiring can signal to the market that not all is going well.

There are even some tools and businesses that monitor things like this, reporting them as part of health metrics.

Because of this, some companies (particularly startups/scaleups) will post job ads that don’t exist, or will feel reluctant to remove job postings even after they’ve either been filled, or the recruitment process has been cancelled, for fear that somewhere someone is counting how many jobs they have active, and a potential investor/competitor will use that to discern they’re not doing as well as they should be.

To keep options open without approved headcount

A business unit knows it will likely take them 6 months to hire for a particular set of roles, and maybe the first 3 months of that will be gathering good potential candidates from the market. But they have not yet had the budget approved to actually do the hiring. Should they:

1. Wait until it’s fully approved, and then wait 6 months from there till the new employees walk in the door
2. Put out a few job ads, gather some CVs, and then – when the budget is approved – bring those candidates in for interview and maybe have people in place within 3 months

For a recruiter the answer may often be ‘B’ – their goal is to hire as soon as possible. Annoying a few candidates by having them apply for jobs they may never hear back about does not negatively affect their goals or metrics.

To benchmark salary expectations

This is likely a little rarer, but – if a recruiter is brought in to hire a lot of roles, and they need to figure out for the organisation what the budget should be, they may quickly float a few job ads to judge. This is particularly the case if they’re looking across a range of regions, or to understand the market across different levels of seniority, and have firm answers to any budget questions, rather than just vague numbers.

To maintain presence during hiring freezes

Related to a few of the above reasons, businesses that regularly hire in particular roles, but hit points where they’re told to freeze hiring, may still keep job ads live – to keep up perceptions in the market, to keep CVs flowing in for when the freeze ends, or even simply to save time and money on the process of updating all the systems to pause hiring, knowing they’ll simply have to reverse all of that work a few weeks or months down the line.

Why ghost jobs are a problem for candidates

Problem: Time spent tailoring applications

For some job applicants this is not an issue – they send out hundreds of job applications almost without thinking about it, with a generic CV and a few lines of covering letter (perhaps even GPT generated). For more conscientious applicants, plenty of time may have been invested on a given job application:

• Researching the company
• Finding out about the likely hiring manager/business unit
• Understanding the organisation’s overall goals
• Figuring out how much of a fit they are, and where they have gaps, and if those matter
• Working through their CV to tailor it for the role
• Putting together a compelling covering letter or note
• Reaching out, chasing, following up…

The above work may take minutes, but it more likely takes hours or days. Multiply that by a few, or a few dozen candidates, and that’s a huge amount of time lost for people, not to mention the effects on how much effort they put in next time around.

Problem: False signals about demand in the market

Ghost jobs also create a false impression of the level of demand for particular jobs. There are 1,000 results for ‘software developer’ in your area. Does that mean there are really 1,000 jobs? Or are there 300 real ones and 700 ghosts? Or 700 real ones and 300 ghosts? There are eight results for ‘chief technology officer’. Are those eight real jobs, or actually zero? This seems small, but can lead to very large issues for candidates, who struggle to get a real picture of what’s happening out there in the job market, and thus can’t make sensible choices about their lives.

Problem: Reduced confidence after repeated silence

How many times have you seen a LinkedIn post from someone who’s applied for ten+ jobs and heard nothing back? It’s so disheartening, and leads to confidence and self esteem issues. And yet, it’s entirely possible nine of those ten jobs never existed. The jobs were fake, but the knock to self esteem can be real.

Problem: Skewed perception of “required” skills and salaries

Additionally, where jobs aren’t real, often the actual detail in job ads may be far away from reality too. This can lead to candidates misunderstanding what the market needs from them in terms of skills for particular roles, and what kind of salaries are the going rate. This problem often becomes amplified, where recruiters themselves judge expectations and salaries on the basis of advertised jobs: They copy info from ‘ghost job’ listings into their real job listings, and those fake job ads end up shaping the real world, even if the info originally made little sense.

Problem: Increased application fatigue and burnout

Perhaps the biggest problem of all is application fatigue. Recruiters are out there looking for great candidates. If those candidates only apply for a handful of jobs each week, or only put their full effort into applying for a handful, there’s every chance they put all of that effort into ghost jobs, and a real job – which would fully suit them, and at which they’d excel – may get a checkbox application, or no application at all. After a while of doing this and getting nowhere, fatigue may set in, and every application becomes a checkbox exercise, leading to genuine recruiters getting what they believe to be poor candidates, and taking candidates months longer than necessary to find a great job if they are not entirely disheartened by the process.

Signs that a job might be a ghost job

We’ve covered the reasons why ghost jobs exist, and the issues that creates for both candidates and recruiters. Slightly more positive news is: There are telltale signs a job listing may be a ‘ghost job’.

Is it a Ghost job? Signals in the job posting

The big five ‘tells’ a job ad may in fact be a ghost job are:

• Job ads reposted repeatedly, with identical wording – this is not always true (as some fields do need to continually hire the same role), but if you’re seeing a ‘head of digital marketing’ role at a company posted every month for a year, there’s a fair chance that’s not a real role
• Labelled ‘urgent’, or for a job that should be highly necessary in the short term, but live for months – again, the real ‘tell’ here is that the ad’s context does not match a real situation. If a role is ‘urgent’, the hiring process cannot last so long
• No closing date or application deadline – while this isn’t a tell in and of itself, it’s a useful way to be able to filter out ghost jobs: get in touch with the recruiter asking for the closing date and there is a fair chance you’ll be able to tell from their response (or non response)
• Vague responsibilities and outcomes – again, this isn’t a perfect tell, as often recruiters don’t fully know the details of the jobs they’re hiring for, but it’s another ‘quality tell’. The lower quality a job ad, the less likely it is worth your time applying
• Overloaded requirements list (“unicorn” roles) – once again, you often see these ads picked out as being ‘impossible’ to fulfill job requirements. The reason for that is sometimes, of course, that the jobs aren’t real at all: someone has just quickly thrown together a job ad, piling in requirements with little thought

Is it a Ghost job? Signals from the company

As well as signs in job details themselves, there are various signs you can look for among company information:

• Recent layoffs or a public hiring freeze: These are sometimes findable by googling the company name along with words like ‘layoffs’, ‘hiring freeze’, etc. They’re sometimes also findable by looking at the company’s LinkedIn profile: If they had, in the past, a habit of posting new hires, and these suddenly dry up, it can be a telltale sign
  
• No recent hires in similar roles: Again, these can sometimes be seen by looking at the company’s LinkedIn profile and posts directly. They may also be seen, with a little more digging, by drilling down from the company’s LinkedIn profile through to look at employees of the business, and from there you may be able to see if there are no recent hires in departments where you would expect them to be frequently adding new employees
  
• Team size shrinking while roles increase: Again, LinkedIn shows you the number of employees on LinkedIn employed by the organisation. If it’s a target company you’re particularly interested in, keeping a semi-regular eye on the number of listed employees can give you an idea of what’s going on behind the scenes.
  
• No named hiring manager or team context: While often this info is not publicly available for good reason (they don’t want too many people reaching out directly to hiring managers, bypassing HR), you can usually ask the HR team to give you that info so that you may research the role. If they’re overly hesitant to give details, it can indicate the situation is not as straightforward as it may initially appear.
  
• Careers page full but rarely updated: This is either a sign the the team is not on top of hiring info, and fail to update things as frequently as they should, or it can be an indication that they’re deliberately leaving things live to keep up appearances. Either way, not the best indicator that your application will be handled quickly, and that there is a real live role.
  

4.3 Signals from recruiters or hiring teams

Finally, among the signals you can get to understand if a role is real or not, there are indicators that the recruiter or hiring teams themselves provide.

• No acknowledgement or response at all: This is an annoying one, as it does not tell you whether the role is real and you’re just not hearing anything, or whether you have spent your time applying for a job that doesn’t exist. To save time, particularly if it’s a role that’s going to take you a good amount of effort to apply for, contacting the recruiter or team ahead of time, even with a simple question, can save you the trouble of applying for a ghost job. If you reach out with a question ahead of time, and get no answer or even a ‘we’re sorry but we cannot answer individual questions’ note, it may be worth saving yourself the trouble of applying.
  
• Long periods of “still reviewing”: If you’re following up on a particularly important role and receiving notes that they’re still looking at things, this can either indicate the role is not real, that they already have a very promising candidate and you’re waiting in the wings as ‘insurance’ on the chance that candidate drops through, or even that it’s  a process that’s being strung along until a time when they are certain they want to hire.
  
• Multiple early-stage interviews with no progress: This can be a sign that hiring is not going to take place imminently, or that they’re keeping candidates strung along until budget is fully signed off. While it’s unlikely a company would do this if there is absolutely zero plan to hire, it’s still useful to understand how ‘active’ the hiring process is to be able to tune your expectations.
  
• Role suddenly paused or put “on hold”: In general, telling candidates roles are ‘on hold’ is quite risky, as it means anyone they’re truly interested in will likely look elsewhere. For that reason, if you’re told a role is on hold during a hiring process, it’s likely it’s essentially no longer going to be hired. If you’re told a process you’re in is on hold, the key question to ask is when it will come off hold. If there’s a reason such as a key hiring member of staff being on holiday with a specific return, that’s good. If there’s no answer, you may be looking at a ‘ghost job’.
  
• Inconsistent role description: The reason this may be a bit of a ‘tell’ re a ghost job is that it may imply the recruiter has not been able to get full detail from the hiring team on exactly what they want. It may therefore indicate they’re speculatively going out to try and find people to put in front of a team that hasn’t fully committed to hiring.

5. How to sanity check roles before applying

If you’re a candidate, currently applying for roles, and want to filter out time-wasting ghost job applications, a few tips, additional to the above ‘tells’, are:

1. Look for recent hires on LinkedIn. Again, you can browse to the list of company’s employees on LinkedIn, and poke around there to see who is new. LinkedIn in general is great for this, particularly if you have any 1st or 2nd degree connections there, you you can subtly ask.
2. Check the hiring manager / team lead’s activity. If you’ve interviewed, or managed to get the details of who you would – theoretically – interview with, looking at what they’ve posted publicly on LinkedIn, Twitter/X, or other public places can help give a guide.
3. See if the role exists in other markets. This is an obvious sign it’s ‘real’, but obviously only available on regionalised jobs.
4. Check whether multiple agencies are advertising the same role. This is generally a positive sign: If more than one recruiter has been willing to take on the job, it’s unlikely they’re all happily wasting their time.

6. Questions that can surface ghost jobs early

If you do spot a role that looks like a ‘ghost job’, but you’re so intent on it that you still want to apply, it’s always worth asking questions. Some candidates worry about bothering recruiters with questions but, if a role is real, they often signal interest to recruiters far more than they annoy them.

6.1 Safe questions to ask recruiters

• Is this a new role, or replacing a leaving member of the team? (a replacement is generally a much quicker hire than a new role, and obviously signals a real ‘gap’ in the team, rather than adding on anything new)
• What’s triggered the need to hire right now?
• What stage is the role at internally? (This is essentially a code phrase to check whether there is activity. ‘We have had several people interview’ is obviously a better sign than ‘we’re just at early stages’)
• What does success like in the first 90 days for this role? (This may sound very generic, but most HR/hiring teams will have at least some idea of this if they’re really put the role together from the point of view of hiring for it *right now*)

These questions all work because they test urgency without sounding confrontational, they reveal budget and approval status, they expose whether any real outcomes for the role have yet been defined, and they signal your intent as a thoughtful candidate.

7. When applying to a ghost job might still make sense

Though you should not pin your hopes on something, there are occasions where you may still want to apply for a role even though you strongly suspect it’s a ghost job. Here are the few instances where it may make sense:

• If the company is a priority target anyway – if it is the company you’re aiming at, and you do not have any other connections there, this may be a simple way to get a foot in the door, and then keep a relationship going with HR toward any actual roles.
  
• If the role closely matches your experience – if it’s a super close match for your experience, there will be little need to tailor your CV and cover letter. Therefore, a quick send in with low expectations may still be sensible.
  
• If you’re building relationships with recruiters – again, this is similar to the ‘priority target’ instance. If it’s a third party recruiter, applying for roles both allows you to demonstrate your experience to them, and to help them out by feeding them an additional CV they can pass to their client. Again, your expectations should be low, and you should not pin hopes or spend much time on it, but it is useful if easy.
  
• If you’re aiming for future visibility, not to be immediately hired – just as the company or recruiter may be gathering together CVs for future roles, you may want to do this yourself. If you’re already in a ‘happy’ role and just nudging your profile around to build potential for the future, there is obviously no harm in passing your details across for ‘ghost jobs’, and they may put you on the radar of recruiters and hiring teams in your sector.
  

8. In Summary

Ghost jobs are a real issue in recruitment, and among digital roles they’re perhaps even more prevalent. They’re not the biggest issue there is, but they really have an impact on candidates’ lives – potentially wasting hours or days that could be spent on real applications.

There are ways to spot these roles, and just knowing what they are, why they’re there, and how to spot them puts candidates ahead of the rest of the market.

At Digital Jobs, we’ve built our own systems which analyse every single role we include on the site, scoring them on multiple attributes. While we cannot spot everything, these significantly reduce the likelihood we include ‘ghost jobs’, as it’s our primary responsibility to help you and avoid wasting your time.