You post your CV. You tailor your cover letter. You wait. Nothing. Then you check LinkedIn three months later - the job is still listed. You apply again. Nothing.
Congratulations: you may have been ghosted by a ghost job. And it's happening at industrial scale.
The Numbers Are Striking
A ghost job is a role that is advertised but for which no active hiring is taking place. The vacancy may be frozen, already filled internally, or simply kept live to collect CVs "just in case." In a 2025 LiveCareer survey of 918 HR professionals, only 2% said they never post ghost jobs.
Why Companies Do It
The motivations are more varied - and more calculated - than most candidates assume:
- Signalling growth to investors. An open requisition list looks like momentum. 43% of HR professionals cited this reason directly.
- Making existing employees feel replaceable. 62% - the most common reason - admitted using ghost postings as a form of implicit pressure on current staff.
- Pipeline building. Collecting a pool of pre-screened candidates for a role that may open in future.
- ATS data. Harvesting market salary data and skills benchmarks from applicant profiles.
"Ghost jobs are muddying the jobs report - making Federal Reserve policy decisions harder because official statistics count vacancies that don't exist."
- Dan Kaplan, Senior Client Partner, Korn Ferry
The Macro Distortion
This isn't just a candidate experience problem. Ghost jobs are distorting the entire labour market picture. Since early 2024, job openings have outpaced actual hirings by more than 2.2 million per month according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The rate of hires per job posting has roughly halved in five years - from around 8 hires per 10 postings in 2019 to around 4 per 10 in 2024.
Central banks and governments are making monetary and fiscal policy decisions based on vacancy data that is, in significant part, fictional.
The Regulatory Response Is Coming
Governments are starting to act. California passed legislation in March 2025 requiring employers to disclose whether postings represent actual open vacancies. Ontario introduced a ban on ghost postings taking effect January 2026. A proposed US federal act - the Truth in Job Advertising and Accountability Act - would give the DOL and FTC enforcement power over deceptive listings. LinkedIn has introduced a "verified" tag; more than half of listings now carry it.
What This Means for Workforce Planning
For organisations doing Strategic Workforce Planning, ghost jobs on both sides of the equation create serious problems.
When you are recruiting: the external talent market you are benchmarking against is inflated. Salary expectations, competitor vacancy counts, and skills availability data are all skewed by roles that are not real. Planning based on published vacancy data alone produces unreliable forecasts.
When you are posting: the short-term benefit of looking busy or maintaining a candidate pool comes with growing legal exposure, reputational damage among candidates, and - if the "making employees feel replaceable" logic is in play - a quiet erosion of the trust that retention depends on.
The organisations that do workforce planning properly use internal data - headcount trajectories, attrition patterns, skill gap analysis - rather than treating job board statistics as ground truth. The ghost job phenomenon is yet another reason why.
The Bottom Line
The job market looks more active than it is. If your workforce strategy relies on hiring plans informed by external vacancy data, that strategy needs a second look. Real workforce planning starts from the inside out - with a clear picture of what you have, what you need, and when - not from a job board count that is 20% fiction.