The Jobs That Aren't There: Evergreen Postings, Ghost Jobs and Phantom Openings

18 Oct 2026 · 12 min read

Somewhere between one in seven and one in three job postings you see today has no real hire behind it. You tailor the resume, write the cover letter, answer the screening questions, and then nothing. Often the silence is not about you. The job was never there.

The numbers vary by method, but they all point the same way. Greenhouse found 18 to 22% of postings on its own platform were for roles companies did not intend to fill (Orbyt Labs summary). A Clarify Capital analysis of more than 175,000 US listings put it at about 1 in 7 overall, rising to roughly 21% for senior roles (Glider AI). And in a March 2026 Enhancv survey of 1,000 US professionals, 47% said they had applied for a role they later learned did not exist (Fast Company).

This post looks at the different kinds of jobs that aren't, why employers and consultancies keep posting them, the incentives that make it rational, and what it costs the people on the other side of the Apply button.

Five kinds of jobs that aren't quite jobs

Not every phantom listing is dishonest in the same way. Some are open about being a pipeline; some are a real employer wasting your time; some are criminals. Lumping them together makes it harder to respond well.

| Type | Who posts it | Is there a real seat? | What it costs you | Telltale signs | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Evergreen requisition | Large employers, high-turnover roles (sales, support, nursing, SDE I) | Sometimes, eventually; hiring is rolling, not tied to one opening | Time, plus long silence while you sit in a talent pool | "Always looking for", no team or manager named, same listing up for months | | Ghost job | Real companies, any size | No, or not now: frozen budget, pre-picked internal hire, or no intent at all | Hours of tailoring, interviews that go nowhere, false hope | Posted 30+ days, reposted with a fresh date, no salary band, no named recruiter | | Careers-page phantom | Real companies, on their own site or ATS | The role exists on paper only: a stale req nobody closed, a placeholder for headcount, a "general application" | Your data stored indefinitely in an ATS; no response ever | Not on any board, or on boards but missing from the careers page; vague title; no close date | | Consultancy or staffing listing | Recruiters, staffing firms, body shops | Maybe a client need, maybe a hoped-for one, maybe none | Resume shopped to clients without consent, bait-and-switch roles | Unnamed "leading client", generic JD, asks for your resume and rate before details | | Fake job (scam) | Fraudsters, often impersonating real brands | No | Money, identity, bank details | Asks for fees, "equipment" payments, ID or bank details before an offer; chat-only interviews |

The last row is a different animal: a crime, not a hiring practice. The first four are legal almost everywhere. That legality is the heart of the problem.

Why employers post jobs they won't fill

Most employers who do this are not villains. They are responding to motives that each make local sense. Employer surveys and reporting point to seven recurring ones.

Pipeline building. Collect resumes now for a role that might open next quarter, so the recruiter isn't starting from zero when budget lands. Evergreen requisitions are the formal version of this.
Signaling growth. A busy careers page tells investors, customers and analysts the company is expanding, even during a freeze. In a 2022 Clarify Capital survey of 1,045 hiring managers, 43% said they kept roles posted to motivate staff or to look like they were growing (Clarify Capital).
Keeping current employees on edge. Among hiring managers in a 2024 Resume Builder survey who admitted to fake listings, 62% said one aim was to make existing employees feel replaceable (Resume Builder). It is a cheap, deniable pressure tactic.
The pre-decided internal hire. Policy, a union agreement or a public-sector rule requires an external posting, but the manager already has someone in mind. Outside applicants are window dressing.
Compliance-driven ads. In immigration processes such as US PERM labor certification, employers must advertise a role and show no qualified local worker applied, often for a position already filled by the sponsored employee. The ad is a legal step, not a search.
Market intelligence. A posting is a free survey. Applications reveal who is available, what they earn, and what competitors' staff will move for. Enhancv's 2026 study named competitive intelligence and growth signaling as the two main motives (Fast Company).
Budget limbo and plain neglect. The requisition was approved, then frozen; or the role was filled and nobody closed the listing. Many careers-page phantoms are simply stale data that nobody owns.

Notice that only the last motive is accidental. The rest are deliberate, and several actively benefit from the candidate never finding out.

Why consultancies and staffing firms do it

For a third-party recruiter, candidates are inventory, and a job ad is the cheapest way to restock the shelves. The US Congressional Research Service's brief on ghost postings notes that staffing agencies may invent openings outright (CRS In Focus IF12977). The motives are commercial rather than managerial:

Speed wins the placement. Agencies are usually paid only if their candidate is hired, and several agencies often race for one client role. Whoever submits a vetted resume first wins, so firms keep pre-screened people on file before any client calls. Resume Builder's Stacie Haller described temp agencies running ads constantly for exactly this reason (NBC New York / CNBC).
Building a bench to pitch. IT services and contract firms win business by showing a client a shortlist of ready profiles. A posting for a role the client never approved is how they fill that shortlist.
Market mapping and rate discovery. Applicants disclose current pay, expected rates, notice periods and visa status. That data sharpens the firm's pricing against both clients and competitors.
Recycling winning ads. A listing that drew strong applicants keeps running long after the role is filled, because it still works as bait.
Recruiter activity metrics. Many agency recruiters are measured on calls, submissions and pipeline size, not only placements. Phantom ads generate all three.
Platform padding and data resale. Some low-quality job sites and lead-generation outfits post or scrape listings to look busy, then monetise the contact data they collect (StaffDNA).

The telltale pattern is the "leading client" who is never named, a job description that could describe a hundred companies, and an early request for your resume, current salary and expected rate before you learn anything specific.

The incentives that make it rational

Ghost postings persist because every party with the power to stop them gains a little from them, and the cost lands on the one party with no power: the applicant.

Posting is nearly free; silence is free. A listing costs a few minutes and, on many boards, little or no money. Rejecting or updating thousands of applicants costs recruiter time. Ignoring them costs nothing.
The benefits are real, at least on paper. In Resume Builder's 2024 survey, a majority of hiring managers said fake postings had a positive effect on revenue, morale and productivity, and 70% called the practice acceptable or probably acceptable (Staffing Industry Analysts).
The penalty is close to zero. Outside a handful of jurisdictions, no law requires a posting to match a real vacancy. Even getting caught carries little cost: 66% of the same managers said employees, investors or applicants had discovered the practice anyway.
Tools default to "open forever". Many applicant tracking systems leave requisitions live until someone manually closes them, and aggregators scrape and repost listings long after the source is gone. Nobody owns the cleanup.
Job boards profit from volume. More listings mean more traffic, more applicant sign-ups and more paid promotions. A board has little reason to purge stale or speculative ads aggressively.
Recruiter scorecards reward activity. Applications received, pipeline size and time-to-submit are easy to measure. Candidate experience and honest posting are not.
Applicants can't punish what they can't see. Because the candidate rarely learns the job was never real, the employer's reputation rarely suffers in a way that shows up in its numbers.

The net effect shows in conversion data. Revelio Labs found hires per job posting roughly halved, from about 0.8 in 2019 to about 0.4 by 2024 (Orbyt Labs summary). Postings have become a weaker signal that a job exists.

What it costs job seekers

For the employer, a ghost posting is a rounding error. For the person applying, it is lost time, money, data and confidence, compounded over dozens of applications.

Time. A tailored application takes an hour or more; a multi-round process can take days. When a large share of listings are phantoms, a big slice of that effort is spent on applications with no chance of success.
Money. In Enhancv's 2026 survey, 37% of job seekers reported out-of-pocket costs such as travel, childcare and paid certifications from chasing roles that turned out not to exist (Fast Company). Over half of senior professionals with eight or more years' experience said they had applied and interviewed for ghost jobs.
Mental health and self-worth. Silence is ambiguous, so people blame themselves: the resume, the age, the gap, the accent. Repeated rejection with no feedback drives burnout, and Enhancv found 12% of respondents had given up on major job boards entirely.
Bad decisions built on false signals. Candidates may turn down a modest real offer, delay a career switch, or stay in a toxic job because the market looks full of openings. Policymakers and economists misread labor demand for the same reason.
Data exposure. Every application leaves a resume, phone number, address and salary history in someone's ATS or recruiter spreadsheet, often indefinitely. Consultancies may forward profiles to clients without consent, which can even surface in front of a current employer.
A wider opening for fraud. Normalised fake listings make real scams harder to spot. US job-scam losses reported to the FTC grew from about $90 million in 2020 to $501 million in 2024 (Bitdefender, citing FTC data), and the FBI's IC3 logged about $363 million in employment-fraud losses in 2025, including roughly $13 million tied to deepfake interviews (TechBullion, citing IC3).
Eroded trust, which hurts honest employers too. When candidates assume most listings are fake, they apply less carefully or not at all. Genuine roles then draw weaker pools and take longer to fill.

The costs fall hardest on those with the least slack: new graduates, career changers, people re-entering work after caregiving, migrants and anyone already unemployed.

The law is starting to catch up

Regulators are moving from pay transparency to hiring transparency. Ontario is the only major jurisdiction where a ghost-job rule is already in force; New York's bill is the closest US law, and several states are drafting copies.

| Jurisdiction | Measure | Status (Oct 2026) | Key requirement | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Ontario, Canada | Employment Standards Act, via the Working for Workers acts (Ontario.ca) | In force since 1 Jan 2026 | Employers with 25+ staff must state whether a posting is for an existing vacancy, show pay or a range, disclose AI screening, and tell interviewed candidates the outcome within 45 days | | New York State, US | S8877 "Ghost Jobs" bill (Morgan Lewis) | Passed both houses June 2026; awaiting Governor Hochul's action in the latest reports found | Employers with 100+ staff and job sites must say in bold capitals whether the role is a current vacancy and when it will be filled; filled ads removed within two weeks; $2,500 fines per platform (SHRM) | | California, US | Vacancy disclosure bill (Staffing Industry Analysts) | Passed Assembly; stalled in Senate Appropriations since Aug 2025 | Every private employer must state whether a posting is for a real vacancy; $100 to $10,000 per violation | | New Jersey, US | S2136 | Introduced | Disclose whether a posting is an active opening and when it will be filled | | Pennsylvania, US | Ghost Job Postings Prevention Act (HR Executive) | Proposed | Disclose existing vs anticipated vacancy, a hiring timeline, and how often the role was posted in the past year |

There is still no US federal rule, though the Congressional Research Service has formally described the phenomenon and a US senator has pressed the administration to act. Platforms are a second lever: the more boards that auto-expire stale listings and surface "actively reviewing" signals, the less room ghost postings have to hide.

How to protect yourself

You can't fix the incentives alone, but five minutes of checking before you apply saves hours afterwards. Treat each item below as a signal, not proof; three or more failed checks means cap your effort or skip.

Before you apply

[ ] Posted within the last two to four weeks, and not quietly reposted with a fresh date
[ ] Listed on the company's own careers page, not only on aggregators
[ ] Names a team, a manager or a recruiter you can find on LinkedIn
[ ] Specific duties, a location and a salary band, not "always looking for great people"
[ ] Where disclosure laws apply, a statement that it is an existing vacancy

With consultancies and recruiters

[ ] Ask for the client name, or at least the industry and team, before sharing your resume
[ ] Tell them in writing not to submit your profile anywhere without your explicit approval for each role
[ ] Be wary of any role that changes shape once you're engaged

Red lines that mean scam, not ghost

[ ] Any request for money, equipment purchases, training fees or crypto
[ ] Requests for ID, bank or tax details before a written offer
[ ] Interviews only by text or chat apps, or an offer with no interview at all

Shift your effort toward what responds

[ ] Track every application and where it came from; after 30, compare response rates by source
[ ] Put more hours into referrals and direct outreach to hiring managers, fewer into board blasts
[ ] Treat three weeks of silence as a no, and move on without self-blame

The posting is not the job

Ghost jobs are what happens when posting costs nothing, honesty costs effort, and the person who pays never gets to see the bill. Employers gain pipelines, signals and leverage; consultancies gain inventory; job boards gain traffic. Job seekers absorb the time, money and self-doubt.

That balance is starting to shift as Ontario's rule bites and New York, California and others weigh their own. Until disclosure is the norm, the best defence is to treat a listing as a claim to verify, not a promise, and to spend your energy where real humans answer back.

If you hire, the fix is simple and cheap: close reqs when they're filled, label pipeline postings honestly, and reply to the people who took the time to apply.