elevated severityPrevalence · ~21% of US postings
Ghost Jobs: Postings That Were Never Real
Postings kept live with no intent to hire — for pipeline building, salary benchmarking, or growth signaling.
Ghost jobs aren't criminal, but they waste enormous amounts of applicant time and energy. Companies post roles to signal growth to investors, build candidate pipelines for future openings, satisfy internal posting quotas, or benchmark market salaries — without any plan to hire in the listed timeframe. Applicants apply, get auto-rejected or ghosted, and never learn the role was never real.
Red flags
- 01Same posting reposted every 30 days for 3+ consecutive months
- 02No hiring manager or recruiter name attached
- 03Generic JD with no team, product, or stack specifics
- 04Salary band marked 'competitive' or omitted entirely
- 05Application requires extensive custom work (cover letter, portfolio review, take-home) with no human response
Real-world example
A 'Senior Product Designer' role at a Series C SaaS company has been reposted on Greenhouse every 27–32 days for the past 11 months. The JD is generic across three different roles on the company's careers page. No designer has been hired in that team according to LinkedIn.
Why this scam works
Companies face no penalty for keeping ghost postings live. Job boards optimize for posting volume, not posting quality. Applicants assume any active posting represents a real opportunity.
What to do
- 01Check posting age and repost history before investing time in an application
- 02Search LinkedIn for the hiring manager — if no one is identified, ask in the application
- 03Skip roles that have been live more than 90 days with no recruiter contact
- 04Use Sentari to score postings for ghost-job patterns automatically
Run any suspicious posting through Sentari.
Free risk score in 12 seconds. No signup required.
Related scam patterns
Company Impersonation: Fake Postings on Real Brand Names
A fraudulent posting uses a real company's name, logo, and JD format to lend legitimacy to a scam.
Crypto-Paid 'Jobs' and Web3 Recruitment Scams
A 'Web3 startup' offers a role with salary paid in unfamiliar tokens, often combined with wallet-draining onboarding tasks.