Ghost Jobs: When Hiring Looks More Active Than It Really Is

This is what happens with what are increasingly being called ghost jobs: positions that appear to be active, but where there may be little or no real hiring activity happening behind the scenes.

Sometimes the role was never genuinely intended to be filled. Sometimes it was real but has since been frozen, cancelled, filled internally, or simply forgotten. Other companies may keep a listing open because they expect to hire for that type of position in the future.

The job is there, but the opportunity may not be.

And there are now enough of these roles around for candidates to have started noticing.

Recent research suggests the problem is significant, although the exact scale is difficult to measure. Greenhouse found that around 19% of job postings on digital job boards in the second quarter of 2026 received applications without producing meaningful hiring activity, such as interviews or assessments. Academic research has also found evidence that a substantial share of online job postings may exhibit characteristics associated with ghost jobs.

Neither figure proves that employers are deliberately inventing jobs. There is no global database of positions that companies secretly never intended to fill, and there is no single definition of a ghost job that everyone agrees on. A role can be paused or abandoned for perfectly ordinary business reasons.

But the signal is difficult to ignore: candidates are encountering a growing number of advertised roles that do not behave like active searches.

A candidate looking at a job advertisement is making a fairly basic assumption: if a company has taken the time to publish a role, there is a reasonable possibility that someone is going to be hired.

It is not an unreasonable expectation.

A job posting is a piece of communication from an employer. It tells a candidate that the business has a need, that there is a role to be filled, and that the company is prepared to spend time speaking to people who might fill it.

When that is no longer true, even for reasons that seem perfectly understandable from inside the company, the candidate is left with an experience that feels misleading.

And candidates are already entering the hiring process with questions about how much they can trust it.

Gartner found in 2025 that only half of job candidates trusted that the jobs they were applying for were legitimate. Its research also found growing concerns about AI in recruitment, with only 26% of candidates saying they trusted AI to evaluate them fairly.

Ghost jobs add another question to that list:

Is anyone actually hiring?

When candidates stop trusting the signal, they change how they respond to it. They may apply more broadly, spend less time on individual applications, rely more heavily on referrals and direct approaches, or decide that a company is not worth the effort.

That creates a problem that extends beyond one outdated vacancy. The job posting becomes part of how candidates judge the company itself.

A careers page is often treated as an operational corner of the business. HR owns it. Talent acquisition updates it. Marketing might occasionally help with the design. Once a vacancy is approved, it goes online and everyone moves on to the next thing.

Candidates do not experience it that way.

They see the careers page as part of the company. The same person who reads your job description may also look at your leadership team, your LinkedIn presence, your website, your employees, review sites, and the way you communicate with them during the hiring process.

None of these things exists in isolation in the candidate’s mind. Together, they form a picture of what the company is actually like.

That makes an old job posting more consequential than it might appear.

If a candidate sees the same position advertised for six months, they may start asking why nobody has been hired. Maybe the company cannot find the right person. Maybe the role keeps changing. Maybe the business is not actually growing. Maybe the company simply leaves every possible vacancy online in case the right person happens to appear.

None of those interpretations is particularly helpful.

The problem is not that hiring plans change. They always will.

The problem is when the communication does not change with them.

It is important not to turn this into a story about dishonest employers.

A role can be approved in January and frozen in February. A leadership change can alter its scope. A budget can move into the next quarter. An internal candidate can fill the position without anyone updating the external listing. A company can decide that it would rather wait for an exceptional candidate than hire quickly.

Recruiters and hiring managers are dealing with these changes while managing their own workloads, which makes an outdated job advertisement surprisingly easy to overlook.

There are also companies that deliberately maintain talent pipelines for future hiring. That can be perfectly legitimate. If a business knows it will probably need several people with a particular skill set later in the year, there is nothing inherently wrong with meeting candidates early.

The important distinction is how that opportunity is communicated.

There is a meaningful difference between saying:

“We are actively hiring for this position.”

And saying:

“We expect to hire for this type of role later this year and would like to meet people who may be a fit.”

The second may attract fewer applications. But the people who respond understand what they are responding to.

Candidates can understand uncertainty.

What they struggle with is uncertainty disguised as opportunity.

There is another reason ghost jobs are worth looking at: they reveal how easily recruitment can become focused on activity rather than progress.

• How many people applied?

• How many CVs did we receive?

• How many people are in the pipeline?

• How many vacancies are currently advertised?

These numbers are easy to report, so they can be easy to optimize. But volume is not the same thing as progress.

A company can receive hundreds of applications for a role that was never properly defined. It can spend weeks screening candidates for a position that has not been fully approved. It can keep a requisition open because closing it feels like admitting that the hiring plan has changed.

None of this moves the business closer to making a good hire.

The more useful question usually comes much earlier:

What problem are we actually trying to solve by hiring this person?

Perhaps the business needs someone to build a new function. Perhaps a team has outgrown its current structure. Perhaps the company needs a leader who can take an existing operation into its next stage. Perhaps the role advertised six months ago no longer reflects what the business actually needs today.

A good search starts with that context before looking for names.

That is why a job description should never be mistaken for the search itself.

The description is what gets published. The real work is understanding what the organisation needs, what success should look like, and what kind of person is realistically capable of delivering it.

If that thinking has not happened yet, putting the vacancy online does not solve the problem.

It only gives the problem an application button.

Start by looking at what is already there.

An ATS audit should not simply ask how many vacancies are open. It should ask whether those vacancies still represent real business needs.

• Which roles have an approved budget?

• Which have an active hiring manager?

• Which have had meaningful candidate movement recently?

• Which have changed since they were first written?

• Which are effectively paused but still presented to candidates as active?

There is also value in giving job advertisements a shelf life.

If a position has been open for 60 or 90 days without meaningful progress, that should trigger a conversation rather than another automatic repost.

Sometimes the right decision will be to close it.

Sometimes it will be to rewrite it.

Sometimes it will be to admit that the company is not ready to hire.

That last option can feel uncomfortable, but there is something valuable about saying so.

A company does not need to look like it is hiring for everything to appear successful.

In fact, a careers page with eight genuine vacancies can tell a stronger story than one with eighty positions that nobody can explain.

The same principle applies to the hiring process itself. Telling a candidate that a search has been paused may create more trust than keeping them waiting indefinitely. Being clear that a role is a future hiring need may attract fewer applications, but it can create a better conversation with the people who do respond.

Credibility is more valuable than looking busy.

And this matters even more for experienced candidates, who tend to be more deliberate about where they invest their time.

At the senior end of the market, recruitment is rarely just about whether someone meets the requirements written on a page. It is about whether the opportunity makes sense for the person, whether the business is clear about what it needs, and whether there is enough substance behind the opportunity to make the conversation worthwhile.

That clarity is valuable.

Ghost jobs may be particularly visible around Halloween, but the issue will outlast October.

Every job advertisement represents a small exchange of trust.

A company is asking someone to invest their time, attention, and often a surprising amount of emotional energy into an opportunity.

In return, the candidate expects the opportunity to be genuine.

Companies will always have roles that change, pause, or disappear. That is normal. The goal is not to create a world where every vacancy is guaranteed to lead to a hire.

The goal is to create a hiring process in which candidates can understand what is actually happening.

So before Halloween arrives, it might be worth taking a walk through your careers page.

Look at the roles that have been there for months. Look at the ones that have been reposted. Look at the ones nobody remembers opening.

Then ask the uncomfortable question:

If a great candidate applied tomorrow, would we actually be ready to have a conversation with them?

If the answer is no, the job probably does not belong on the careers page.

Close it or rewrite it. Tell people the truth about where the hiring process actually stands.

Because the strongest employer brands are not necessarily the ones that appear to be hiring for everything.

They are the ones whose candidates believe that when the company says “we’re hiring,” it actually means it.