Why are there so many ghost jobs?
There are many ghost jobs because most are produced by process rather than intent. Evergreen pipelines for roles a company always hires, listings that expire and get renewed, applicant tracking systems that repost automatically, aggregators that copy a role after it is filled, and budgets that pause after a posting goes live leave listings public with nobody filling them.
The evergreen pipeline is the largest single source. A hospital always needs nurses, a logistics company always needs drivers, a software vendor always needs account executives, so the requisition never comes down and applications are banked for the next opening. Budget holds add to it: a role is approved, posted, and then frozen when the quarter changes, and nobody is assigned to remove the listing. Neither case involves deception, but from the applicant's side both behave identically to a job that was never real.
The mechanics of job boards multiply the effect. LinkedIn and Indeed listings run on a fixed expiry, and renewing one resets the posted date so a months-old role looks fresh. Enterprise applicant tracking systems such as Workday and SmartRecruiters re-list rolling requisitions as routine, which is why their reposted shares sit far above the boards fed by a single employer feed. Aggregators and staffing agencies then copy postings from all of these sources, and a copy often outlives the original because nothing tells the copier that the role closed.
The chart below shows the share of active postings on each collected board that was seen again after a gap of ten days or more, which is the clearest fingerprint of a re-listed role. It is a small share on most boards and a large one on the boards built around rolling requisitions. JobsPipe records every sighting, so a reposted role carries the reposted reason on its ghost score and keeps its original discovered_at. Passing max_ghost_score and posted_at_max_age_days to the jobs search endpoint drops most of them from a feed.
- Y Combinator63.6%
- SmartRecruiters52.6%
- Workday47.1%
- Ashby11.0%
- LinkedIn9.9%
- Workable6.1%
- Indeed4.8%
- Lever2.4%
- Greenhouse2.3%
- Paylocity2.2%
The full treatment is on Ghost jobs.
Related questions
Why are ghost jobs a thing?
Because a posting costs almost nothing to leave up and something to take down. Boards and applicant tracking systems default to keeping listings public until an expiry or a manual close, recruiters are measured on pipeline, and no rule requires removal. Add renewals that reset the posted date and you get listings that outlive the hiring decision behind them.
Are ghost jobs posted on purpose?
Some are. Recruiters repost stale roles to reach the top of a board again, agencies keep evergreen ads to collect candidates, and companies keep a hiring page live between rounds to signal growth. Most, though, are left up by process: an unclosed requisition, a renewed listing or an aggregator copy that nobody updated.
Do applicant tracking systems create ghost jobs?
They can. Enterprise systems built around rolling requisitions re-list roles continuously, which is why Workday and SmartRecruiters carry the highest reposted shares among the boards JobsPipe collects apart from Y Combinator. Boards fed directly from a single employer's system, such as Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby, drop a posting from the feed when the requisition closes, so the same behavior is rare there.
How do I avoid ghost jobs when I search?
Prefer postings with a recent first-seen date over a recent posted date, skip roles that disappeared and came back, and treat postings from employers with hundreds of open roles as pipelines rather than vacancies. In the JobsPipe API the same rules are a max_ghost_score filter plus posted_at_max_age_days.
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