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Some postings have no job behind them. Here’s what to look at before you spend an hour writing an application, and what none of it proves.
You send the application. Nothing comes back. That happens for a hundred ordinary reasons, but one of them is that there was never a job there to apply for.
Most of them aren’t scams. A ghost job is usually a real employer advertising work that nobody is hiring for right now. The role got filled and the ad stayed up. Or the ad is out there to collect resumes for a hire that might happen next quarter, or to make the company look like it’s growing.
It’s common enough to have been counted. Greenhouse, which runs the hiring software behind a lot of company careers pages, reported that 18 to 22 percent of the jobs posted on its own platform are classified as ghost jobs in any given quarter. A separate February 2026 study scraped 176,268 Indeed listings and flagged about 1 in 7 active posts, counting anything still live after 30 days.
Neither of those is a count of every job ad on the internet, and neither claims to be. But they’re measuring the same thing you keep running into.
The date is the strongest signal there is, and it’s the one those studies actually measure. In the Indeed study above, 4 percent of listings had been sitting there for four months or more.
The trouble is that boards don’t always show you a real date. Some show when the ad was last refreshed, which an employer can do forever. If the board tells you nothing, the employer’s own careers page sometimes does.
If a big company with a full careers page isn’t listing the role there, the ad on the board has usually outlived the opening. That’s not a rule, though. Plenty of small employers post to one board and have no careers page at all, and their postings are perfectly live.
A posting that names a wage has committed to something. One that says competitive salary has committed to nothing, and an employer who isn’t ready to say what the work pays often isn’t ready to hire for it either. It’s also the fastest thing on this list to check.
This one is a different problem from a stale ad. An employer asks for a social insurance or social security number after you’re hired, on payroll paperwork. Banking details come the same way. Not in the ad, and not in the first form you fill out. A posting that wants identity documents before a single person has spoken to you is worth walking away from.
Real postings leak specifics. The shift, the site, the equipment, the name of the system you’d be using. Template language is the opposite. It could be pasted into an ad for any employer in the country without changing a word, and when the whole posting reads that way, often that’s exactly what happened to it.
None of these signals is proof, and anyone selling you certainty about a stranger’s hiring plans is making it up. An old date can mean a slow hiring committee. A missing careers page can mean a company with fourteen staff and no web budget.
What the signals are good for is deciding where your hours go. If a posting you want has three of them against it, apply anyway. Just don’t let it be the only one you send that week.
Read next: How to tailor your resume to a job posting.
Sources, checked 3 September 2026.
Greenhouse, 2024 State of Job Hunting report, published 10 December 2024, 2,500 workers surveyed across the US, UK and Germany. greenhouse.com
Clarify Capital, ghost jobs study, February 2026, 176,268 Indeed listings across 49 industries and every US state, with listings active 30 days or longer flagged. clarifycapital.com
Paste a posting’s words, and Jobstance walks the same ground this page just covered. It’s the free part of the site.
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