Ghost Job

A job posting for a role the company isn't actively trying to fill — kept live for optics, pipeline-building, or internal bureaucracy.

A ghost job is a live job listing for a position the employer has no immediate intention of filling, or has already filled internally, informally, or through a preferred candidate — while the public posting stays up regardless. Unlike a stale listing that simply hasn't been taken down, a ghost job is often kept active deliberately. Surveys of hiring managers have repeatedly found that a meaningful share of postings — estimates commonly range from 15% to over 30% depending on the survey and industry — are not tied to an active, fillable opening at the time a candidate applies.

Companies keep ghost jobs up for several distinct reasons. Some maintain a running listing to build a talent pipeline for a role they expect to open eventually, without any current urgency. Some keep a posting live to project growth and stability to investors, customers, or competitors — a wall of open roles signals momentum. Some postings exist because internal approval to hire was rescinded or frozen after the listing went live, and no one owns the task of removing it. And in a smaller number of cases, a role has already been filled — often by an internal transfer or a referral — but the posting stays up to satisfy a formal policy requiring external roles to be posted, even when the outcome is predetermined.

For job seekers, ghost jobs are a real and frustrating cost: time spent tailoring an application and preparing for a process that was never going anywhere. There's no reliable way to identify a ghost job from the outside with certainty, but pattern recognition helps — a listing that's been live for months with no update, a role that reappears repeatedly at the same company, or a company with an unusually large number of open reqs relative to its headcount and hiring cadence are all soft signals worth weighing before investing significant application effort.