The Mundane Explanation for Ghost Jobs

Even though it's a little early for Halloween, ghost jobs are in the news. If you’ve been job hunting or even casually browsing job boards, you’ve likely come across one — a position that looks legitimate, but doesn't actually exist. The recent buzz around ghost jobs has been fueled in part by a rather alarming statistic: 81% of recruiters of the more than 750 recruiters surveyed said they post these jobs.

Hold on — 81% of recruiters are just out there posting jobs that don’t exist?

That number should make anyone do a double-take. As someone who’s been involved in countless surveys targeting talent acquisition leaders and met thousands of recruiting leaders over the years, this doesn’t seem right.

What Are Ghost Jobs?

Before we jump into figuring out what's going on, let’s define ghost jobs. The term refers to job postings that do not actually correspond to an open or available position. This can happen for various reasons, including:

Scams or Data Harvesting: Some ghost jobs are created to collect personal information from unsuspecting job seekers. These can sometimes be outright scams, designed to steal data or money.
Recruiting Strategies: In some cases, companies might post jobs to gauge interest or keep a presence on job boards, even if they are not actively hiring. They might do this to test the market response for hard-to-fill positions or to gather resumes for potential future openings.
Administrative Oversights or Errors: Sometimes, ghost jobs are simply a failure to remove outdated job listings. A job might stay posted for months even after it’s been filled because of administrative errors or the complexities of updating listings across multiple platforms.

Now let’s talk about the data.

Are Recruiters Really Posting That Many Fake Jobs?

Recruiters can’t control scam and data harvesting jobs posted on job boards, and its unlikely the 81% figure accounts for these types of jobs. Given that, we can assume the four-in-five recruiters who post ghost jobs are doing it as either 1) a recruiting strategy or 2) some sort of avoidable mistake.

As a recruiting strategy, building talent pools doesn’t make sense unless you tell candidates upfront that they aren’t applying for an open position. Creating talent pools predates the internet, but it doesn’t work if candidates feel like they’ve been misled or ghosted. After all, you want them to take your call when you actually have an open position.

Another flaw to this approach is obvious when you think about the day-to-day realities of a recruiter’s job. They’re already drowning in applications for legitimate openings. Why on earth would they create more work for themselves by posting phantom jobs? It’s not like they have an abundance of free time. Every job listing means more resumes to sift through, more candidates to respond to and more follow-ups. From a practical standpoint, there’s no incentive for them to manufacture more busy work.

The obvious answer is that most ghost jobs are outdated postings that never got pulled down due to technical or administrative issues.

Consider this scenario: A company hires someone for a position but forgets to take down the job posting. Or perhaps they posted the job on multiple platforms, and some of those listings weren’t updated or closed properly.

This lack of oversight is still annoyingly common, especially for companies that post jobs on multiple job boards and have to manually update each one. If a job has been sitting on Indeed for 47 days and you can’t find it on the company’s career site, that’s a good indication that the job has been filled. It’s frustrating for job seekers, sure, but it doesn’t mean the job never existed.

The Truth About Ghost Jobs

So, what’s the real story with ghost jobs? While ghost jobs are indeed a growing concern, the actual prevalence of evil recruiters posting fake jobs to waste a candidate’s time and frustrate them is likely much lower than what the storylines suggest. I’m talking single-digit percentages.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter, and even one ghost job is one too many. Using a fake job to build a talent pool without disclosing the truth is not only unethical but also a poor strategy. Job candidates have a finite amount of time. If I knew an open job was simply about collecting resumes for a future, undetermined opening, I would deprioritize submitting my information but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t. Candidates can do the math and play the long game. What they don’t appreciate is getting tricked.

A job left up carelessly because of administrative or technical oversights is a waste of resources and a bad candidate experience. It’s a lot less interesting of a story to say that an API update on a job board caused the applicant tracking system or recruitment marketing platform to not close jobs when they were closed in the hiring system. Lumping in maliciously posted jobs with mistakes because it makes a more provocative story doesn’t seem right.

What organizations can take away from this is that candidates probably don’t care why a job they spent time applying for isn’t actually open. Assuming your company isn’t dumb enough to post jobs that don’t exist to collect resumes, do yourself and job candidates a favor and schedule regular checks and audits of your distribution network for jobs.

Ghost Jobs Are Real, but We’re Not in Crisis Mode

The bottom line? Ghost jobs exist, but they’re not as prevalent or sinister as some statistics and reports suggest. Most of the time, they’re the result of outdated postings, administrative errors or technical issues — not deliberate deception.

Deliberate or not, ghost jobs do challenge our understanding of the job market and waste candidates' time. And while I’d love to know that 100% of open jobs are truly real jobs, the hiring process has bigger challenges to deal with, whether it’s improving the candidate experience or ensuring that human or AI bias isn't negatively and illegally impacting the hiring process.

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