What we actually check
Four facts the posting already publishes. Each one names its source.
Read from the datePosted field in the page's own structured data, or from the oldest matching ad in the public Adzuna index when the page does not publish one.
Present or absent in the posting data. Disclosure correlates with a budgeted seat, and several states now require a range.
From the posting's own validThrough date. A listing still accepting applications past its own stated deadline is a strong staleness signal.
How many matching ads that employer currently runs in the public index. Heavy always-on posting for one title is the classic pipeline pattern.
What we cannot tell you
Only the people inside that company know whether they intend to hire, and they are not publishing it. A clean, fresh, salary-disclosed posting can still be a ghost, and a ninety-day-old one can be a real role that is genuinely hard to fill. Every competitor in this category returns a confident number: a trust score, a ghost-likelihood percentage, fifteen red flags analyzed. All of it is heuristics dressed as measurement. We would rather hand you four checkable facts and let you make the call.
What the data actually says
The honest headline is that the estimates disagree with each other by a factor of three, and almost nobody says so.
| Source | What it found | What it measured |
|---|---|---|
| Greenhouse platform analysis | Roughly 18 to 22% of postings per quarter | An audit of postings on its own hiring platform |
| Clarify Capital | About 1 in 7 active posts | A survey of hiring managers |
| Enhancv survey (Mar 2026, n=1,000 US professionals) | 47% had applied to a role later found not to exist | How many job seekers got burned at least once |
| Congressional Research Service (IF12977, Apr 2025) | No official statistic exists | A review of what is actually measured |
Those numbers are not contradictory so much as different questions. Auditing a platform tells you what share of postings are stale. Surveying job seekers tells you how many people have been affected at least once, which will always run much higher. Anyone quoting you a single confident percentage is choosing one and not telling you.
Why companies do it
Seven documented reasons, none of which are about you.
- Pipeline building. Collecting resumes for a role they expect to open later.
- Signalling growth to investors, customers, or their own staff.
- Testing the market for salary expectations, sometimes reposting the same role lower.
- Maintaining board presence so the company never disappears from search results.
- Agency resume harvesting by recruiters building a candidate database.
- Budgeted but frozen roles that are real on paper and not real this quarter.
- Internal candidate already chosen, with the posting up to satisfy a policy.
So what do you actually do
A stale posting is not automatically a no. Apply with the resume you already have, spend fifteen minutes rather than ninety, and save your good hours for postings under three weeks old.
If the board listing exists but the company's own careers page does not have it, that is worth knowing before you write anything custom.
One short note to someone on that team beats a perfect application into a queue nobody is reading.
Before you send it, check the resume
If the posting looks worth your evening, the next question is whether the software on the other end can read what you send. That scan is also free, also needs no account, and also never uploads your file. It is the same posture as this page: show you the facts, let you decide.
Questions
How common are ghost jobs, really?
Nobody knows, and anyone quoting a number to one decimal place is guessing. There is no official statistic; the Congressional Research Service said as much in April 2025. Greenhouse, auditing its own platform, found roughly 18 to 22 percent of postings in a quarter. Clarify Capital landed near 1 in 7. Surveys of job seekers run far higher because they measure how many people got burned at least once, not what share of postings are fake.
Can this tool prove a job is fake?
No. Nothing can, from the outside. Only the people inside that company know whether they intend to hire. What we show you are four things the posting itself publishes: when it went live, whether pay is disclosed, whether its own deadline has passed, and how many ads that employer currently runs. Sometimes the honest answer is that it looks fine and you should just apply.
A posting is 90 days old. Should I skip it?
Probably not skip it, but time-box it. Some real roles genuinely take months to fill, especially senior, niche, or cleared ones, and age alone proves nothing. Apply with a resume you already have, spend fifteen minutes rather than ninety, and save your best hours for fresher postings. The point of checking the age is deciding how much of yourself to spend, not whether to bother.
Is it illegal for a company to post a job it is not hiring for?
In most of the US right now, no, and that is changing. New York's legislature passed a ghost-job disclosure bill in June 2026 that would require larger employers to state hiring intent and pull filled listings within two weeks. Pennsylvania introduced a similar bill in March 2026, and Ontario's disclosure rules take effect in 2026. We keep this dated and update it as things move.
What is the difference between a ghost job and a job scam?
Different problems needing different responses. A ghost job is usually a real company advertising a role it is not filling right now; it costs you time and morale. A scam is a fake entity after your money or identity. This check is built for the first. If a posting asks you to pay for equipment, interviews only over chat, or wants bank details before an offer, that is the second, and the FTC's consumer alerts are the right place to go.
Do I need an account, and what happens to the link I paste?
No account, no email, no upload. We fetch that posting page once, read the public data it publishes, cross-check a public job index, and show you what we found. There is no resume here because we never asked for one. If you want to check five postings tonight, check five postings tonight.
You sell job-search products. Is it not in your interest to say everything is a ghost job?
It would be, which is exactly why we do not hand you a scary percentage. This check is free, has no signup, and frequently comes back saying the posting looks fine, which is a bad sales tactic and an honest result. If we ever start scoring postings as suspicious to sell you something, we would deserve to lose you.
Both free, both no account. Scout applies the same 21-day freshness filter across your whole search.