How common are ghost jobs?

The latest odd trend in recruiting? Ghost job boards — which, as a surprise to some, are different from fake job boards. While the latter are clear recruiting scams in order to capture data intelligence, ghost job boards are job posts from real companies for openings that simply don’t exist. There’s a number of reasons behind why: 

• the role will be hired for in the future and got opened early
• the role was closed or put on hold for budgetary reasons
• a company wants to impress investors by showing a number of open roles
• the role is posted to simply gauge the talent market
• the team hiring for the role changed directions
• the company had multiple jobs open, but only wanted to hire for one position  

Whatever the reason may be, these ghost jobs are listings for roles that are not actually available. And according to a May 2024 survey from Resume Builder, 4 in 10 companies posted ghost job listings last year. 

We were curious to explore this further and instead analyze real job data over survey responses.

Regardless of ghost job boards, an unfortunate reality of recruiting is that sometimes jobs are closed without making any hires or offers. In analyzing job postings over three years, we found that while the majority of jobs are filled, candidates might apply to a job where no hire is made. In other words, Ashby customers are far less likely to be posting ghost jobs (if at all), signaling that applying to a job on Ashby job board can lead to stronger confidence that candidates are not shooting in the dark. 

From our customer base, we see:

• 82% of open jobs in 2024 were filled (meaning they led to a real hire)

• 18% of jobs were not filled

  • 5.5% jobs were paused
  • 1% of jobs had an offer made but no hire
  • Only 3.5% of jobs had no reason given

Stated another way, about 1 in 5 of jobs are closed without a fill. When we break this up by company size, we see that larger organizations tend to be more stable while smaller companies see more variation in hiring.

However, just because a job closes without a hire doesn’t necessarily mean it is a ghost job. Out of companies with 50 employees or more, we find that:

• 97.5% of jobs move at least some candidates to an active interview stage. This indicates that while almost a fifth of openings are not filled, almost all jobs represent an investment of time and resources for both the candidate and the company. 
• Most companies do a good job at filling their jobs. This skewed distribution shows that filling jobs varies across companies, but the majority do have a high fill rate.

For more snackable insights on recruiting trends, subscribe to our Talent Trends newsletter.