How to spot a ghost job before you apply

A ghost job is a listing for a role the company is not really trying to fill. Some are left up by mistake after the role is filled or the budget is cut. Others stay up on purpose: to collect CVs for later, or to make the company look like it is growing.

It is not the same thing as a scam. A scam wants your money or your personal details. A ghost job only wants your time, and it usually gets it.

Nobody can count ghost jobs directly, because the only people who know a role is not real are the people who posted it. Two numbers give a sense of the scale:

• Greenhouse, which makes hiring software for employers, says that in any given quarter 18 to 22% of the jobs posted on its platform are classified as ghost jobs. In the same report, three in five candidates said they suspect they have come across one (December 2024).
• In a Resume Builder survey of hiring managers launched in May 2024 (649 completed it), 40% said their company had posted a job it did not intend to fill in the past year, and 3 in 10 said their company had one up at the time.

The second figure comes from managers describing their own companies, so read it as a rough guide rather than a count.

1. It has been up for months, or keeps coming back. A role that is still open long after you first saw it, or that vanishes and reappears with a new date, is worth a second look. Write down the day you first saw it.
2. The company’s own careers page does not have it. Search the company’s careers site for the job title. If the role is on a job board but not on the company’s own site, it may have been closed there and left up everywhere else.
3. The description could fit any team. No team, no manager, no project and no start date, only a list of qualities. A real opening usually says what you would work on first.
4. There is no pay, not even a range. On its own this proves nothing: plenty of real employers still leave pay out. In the EU that is changing. Under the Pay Transparency Directive, employers have to tell applicants the starting pay or its range, in the job ad or before the interview, and member states had until 7 June 2026 to write that into national law.
5. The company has just announced a hiring freeze or layoffs. A news search for the company’s name takes a minute and can save you an evening.
6. It talks about a “talent pool” or “future opportunities”. These listings are honest about what they are, but they are not an opening you can get this month.
7. Nobody can tell you what happens next. If a recruiter cannot name the hiring manager, the next step or a rough start date, the role may not have a budget yet.

None of these signs proves anything by itself. Two or three together are a good reason to put your time somewhere else first.

• Apply on the company’s own site when you can. It is the copy most likely to be current, and it goes straight to the people hiring.
• Ask one plain question. “When are you hoping to have someone start?” A real opening usually has an answer.
• Start with the newest listings. Leave the ones that have been up for months until last.
• Keep a record. Note where you applied, when, and when you will follow up. A role that never answers a polite follow-up has told you something too.

Guap lists two kinds of roles. Jobs posted on Guap come from employers who confirmed a code sent to their company email before they could post. Guap also lists roles from company careers sites, checks them again, and closes each one once the company takes it down.

That cannot make every listing a sure thing: a company can leave a role up on its own site long after it stopped hiring for it. So the habits above still apply. If you use Barista, Guap’s Chrome extension, each application it fills is saved with its date, so you can see which ones have gone quiet and when to follow up.