Ghost Jobs: the economy built on positions that don't exist
10 min read

Ghost Jobs: the economy built on positions that don't exist

2025 words
Categories:
Thoughts
Tags:
#employment #job-market #human-resources #economy

Every month, 2.2 million job postings in the United States result in zero hires. Four in ten companies admit their listings are fake. Seven in ten call it morally acceptable. 85 percent still bring candidates in for interviews.

These are not figures from a conspiracy blog. They come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, from surveys of 650 hiring managers published by ResumeBuilder, and from Revelio Labs analytics. The ghost job economy is a documented, quantified phenomenon, and apparently a perfectly tolerated one.

The application that goes nowhere

The experience is universal for anyone who has searched for a job in recent years. You find a listing that looks real. It has a salary range, a team description, a bullet-pointed list of qualifications, a paragraph about company culture. It was posted three days ago. It asks for a cover letter.

You spend 30 minutes to an hour tailoring your resume. You write the letter. You submit everything through the portal. You wait.

The rejection arrives two days later, or two weeks later, or never. The email, if there is one, thanks you for your interest and wishes you well in your future endeavors. It says the company was impressed by your qualifications.

The company did not read your qualifications. In a significant number of cases, it was never going to. The job was not real. It was a ghost.

“The ghost job economy inflates hope and wastes job seekers’ time,” said Jasmine Escalera, career expert at MyPerfectResume, in a November 2025 report. According to their analysis of BLS data, 30 percent of all US job postings never result in a hire. The rate has not moved in four years. It is not a downturn. It is a constant.

The scale

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes a monthly report called the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS). In June 2025, it counted 7.4 million job openings across the United States. The same report counted 5.2 million hires.

The difference is 2.2 million. Reported job openings that did not result in any hire. Not that month. Not ever. According to MyPerfectResume’s analysis, this gap has held between 28 and 32 percent every single month since 2021. Through labor shortages. Through hiring surges. Through layoff waves. The gap does not respond to economic conditions because it is not caused by economic conditions. It is structural.

Revelio Labs, a workforce analytics firm, measured the same phenomenon from the employer side. Their data showed that hires per job posting dropped from roughly 0.8 in 2019 to 0.4 by 2024. The conversion rate has halved over five years. By October 2024, fewer than half of job postings were filled within six months. In previous years, that figure had been 91 percent.

The confession

In May 2024, ResumeBuilder surveyed 650 hiring managers at companies across the United States. The question was direct: has your company posted a job listing for a role it did not intend to fill?

Forty percent said yes.

Three in ten said they had a fake listing active at the time they took the survey. Not in the past. Right now. The listing was up. Applications were coming in. No one was being hired.

The reasons were institutional, not individual. Sixty percent posted fake roles to collect resumes, building what the industry calls a “talent pipeline,” with no immediate plan to hire. Others cited investor signaling: open positions on a careers page suggest growth, and growth attracts capital. Others used applicant data for compensation benchmarking, measuring what candidates were willing to accept, and using the numbers to hold wages down internally.

Seventy percent of companies that posted fake listings said the practice had boosted revenue.

The hardest number to digest: 85 percent of companies that contacted applicants for fake roles actually brought them in for interviews. These were not passive ghosts. They were active. Companies reached out to candidates, scheduled calls, arranged on-site visits, and conducted interviews for positions that would not be filled. The candidates prepared. They took time off work. They bought clothes. They rehearsed answers. The process mimicked hiring in every respect except the part where someone gets hired.

Seven in ten hiring managers surveyed called this practice “morally acceptable.”

The machine

Ghost jobs do not persist because of a single bad company or a single reckless recruiter. They persist because every institution in the hiring supply chain profits from them.

Job boards charge per posting. LinkedIn alone lists an estimated 1.7 million jobs in the United States at any given time. If 20 to 40 percent are ghosts, that represents between 340,000 and 680,000 false listings on a single platform. Each one generates traffic. Traffic generates advertising revenue and premium subscription sales. There is no business model incentive to verify whether a listing corresponds to a real job, because the listing generates the same revenue either way.

Applicant tracking systems (ATS) sell throughput. A system that screens 100,000 resumes for positions that do not exist performs identically, from a software perspective, to one that screens 100,000 resumes for positions that do. The ATS works either way. Its vendor gets paid either way.

A widely repeated claim holds that 75 percent of resumes are rejected by applicant tracking systems before a human ever sees them. The figure has appeared in Forbes, on LinkedIn, in career-coaching materials, and across hundreds of resume-advice articles. But according to an analysis by the recruitment firm Davron, the number is unverifiable. It traces to Preptel, a defunct resume distribution company that never published its methodology and no longer exists as a business. No peer-reviewed study has confirmed the figure. It is folklore, repeated so often that it has acquired the weight of fact.

What is measurable is the output of the overall system: employers report 7.4 million openings. They make 5.2 million hires. The rest disappears into a pipeline that processes applications, sends rejections, and produces no jobs.

The distortion of federal data

Ghost jobs do not only waste applicants’ time. They corrupt the data that the federal government uses to measure the economy.

JOLTS is the primary tool the BLS uses to gauge labor demand. It counts what employers report. It has no mechanism to distinguish between a genuine opening and a ghost. If a company reports 500 openings and fills 34, the BLS records 500.

In March 2022, JOLTS showed job openings above 11 million while hires hovered between 6 and 7 million. Economists cited the number as evidence of a historically tight labor market. The Federal Reserve used the opening figure in monetary policy deliberations. Interest rate decisions were made, decisions that affected mortgage rates, consumer credit, and business lending across the entire economy, calibrated in part to a number that included millions of positions no one intended to fill.

“The rise of ghost jobs is muddying the jobs report,” said Dan Kaplan, a senior client partner at recruiting firm Korn Ferry. “The data tells us there are far more openings than workers. But a significant chunk of those openings don’t represent actual demand.”

The distortion runs in one direction. Ghost jobs inflate the count of openings. They do not inflate the hire count. The result is a federal measure that systematically overstates the number of jobs available and understates how difficult it is to get one. Every month. By millions.

The human cost

The cost of ghost jobs is paid in a currency that does not appear on any balance sheet. It is paid in time.

Industry estimates place the average time to complete a single tailored job application at 30 to 60 minutes. For roles requiring cover letters, portfolios, or assessment tests, the number is higher. A job seeker who submits 40 applications in a month has spent between 20 and 40 hours on the process. If 30 percent of those listings are ghosts, between 6 and 12 of those hours were donated to companies that were never going to hire anyone.

Scaled across the labor force, ghost jobs absorb hundreds of thousands of hours of human effort per month. Time that could have been spent on real applications, on skill development, on rest.

The 85 percent interview rate makes it worse. These are not passive ghosts that simply collect resumes and go quiet. Companies actively reached out to candidates. Scheduled phone screens. Arranged panel interviews. Flew people to offices. The candidates prepared as if the opportunity were real. In every observable respect, it was real. The posting was real. The recruiter’s email was real. The interview questions were real. Only the job was not.

The psychological damage compounds over months. Job seekers in forums and on social media describe the same progression: optimism, then confusion, then self-doubt, then resignation. They stop trusting postings. They stop investing in applications. They assume the worst about every listing, which means they disengage from the legitimate ones too. The ghost economy does not only waste applicants’ time. It poisons the well for employers who are actually hiring.

A petition on Change.org calling for the regulation of ghost jobs has gathered more than 50,000 signatures.

The regulatory silence

There is one proposed federal law. It is called the Truth in Job Advertising and Accountability Act. It would require companies to disclose whether a job posting corresponds to a funded, open position and to remove listings within a set period after a role is filled or canceled. A Congressional Research Service report found the bill legally viable.

It has not passed.

The enforcement problem is simple and decisive. Proving that a company posted a job it never intended to fill requires internal communications, budget documents, hiring plans, and ATS configuration records. The company possesses all of this. The applicant possesses none of it. The asymmetry is total. The company knows the job is fake at the moment of posting. The applicant may never learn it. And the company has no obligation to tell them.

No federal agency audits job postings for authenticity. No platform verifies them. No industry body certifies them. The hiring pipeline operates on an honor system, and four in ten participants have admitted, on the record, that they do not honor it.

The pipeline that never flows

There is a phrase that recurs in the language of recruiters, HR departments, and workforce strategy documents. It appears in SHRM guidelines, in LinkedIn product marketing, and in the quarterly presentations that talent acquisition teams deliver to their executives.

The phrase is “talent pipeline.”

A pipeline, in industrial usage, is infrastructure built to move a resource from one place to another. Oil from a well to a refinery. Water from a reservoir to a city. The pipeline has a source and a destination. The resource enters at one end and exits at the other. That is what makes it a pipeline.

The talent pipeline of the ghost job economy has a source. Millions of applicants enter it every month. They submit resumes, write cover letters, complete assessments, and attend interviews. The pipeline receives them. It processes them. It sorts, screens, and sends automated responses.

It does not have a destination.

The resumes are collected. The salary expectations are benchmarked. The data is presented. The slides are approved. The stock price reflects healthy applicant volume. And the applicant, the person who entered the pipeline believing it led to a job, is still inside it, waiting for an outcome that was never part of the design.

In June 2025, 7.4 million openings were reported. 5.2 million hires were made. The remaining 2.2 million were processed, catalogued, and presented as evidence of a healthy labor market.

The pipeline was never meant to flow. It was only ever meant to fill.

Sources

Comments