Ghost Jobs: How to Tell If a Job Ad Is Real

What ghost jobs are — and why companies post them

A ghost job is a position advertised with no intent to hire. The company is real and the ad looks normal; there is just no vacancy behind it. In October 2026 the term made headlines in New Zealand, where a job seeker launched a petition to Parliament to ban such ads after an AI agent "interviewed" her with timed answers — leaving her to wonder whether the company was only after her personal data to train AI.

The numbers suggest ghost jobs are not rare:

• Greenhouse, an applicant-tracking platform, says 18–22% of the jobs posted on its platform in any given quarter are classified as ghost jobs. In its 2024 survey of 2,500 workers in the US, UK and Germany, three in five candidates said they suspected they had met one.
• In a 2024 ResumeBuilder survey of US hiring managers, 40% said their company had posted a fake job listing that year, and 3 in 10 said they had one live at the time.

The reasons hiring managers gave in that survey are telling: to look open to external talent (67%), to make the company appear to be growing (66%), to make overloaded staff believe help is coming (63%), to make employees feel replaceable (62%) and to collect CVs for later (59%). Add roles that were filled internally, frozen by budget cuts or simply never taken down, and you get a job market where a share of what you apply to was never really open.

Ghost job or fake job offer? The difference matters

The two are easy to confuse, but they cost you different things:

• A ghost job comes from a real employer and costs you time and hope: you tailor a CV, maybe sit an interview, and never hear back.
• A fake job offer comes from someone posing as an employer and costs you money, your bank account or your identity: it ends in a request to pay, to move money, or to hand over ID or logins.
• The grey zone is the one the New Zealand case raised: an unknown company running automated interviews whose real aim may be collecting candidate data. If a company you have never heard of asks for a long recorded or timed AI interview early on, treat it with the same caution as a suspected scam.

Signs a job ad is a ghost job

No single sign proves it, but the more of these you see, the less time the application deserves:

• It isn't on the company's own careers page, or it is listed there with a different date or a different title.
• The same ad has been reposted again and again, or has been up for months. Indeed's own rules say each job post should describe one open role and that old posts should be updated rather than posted again — so a role that keeps reappearing as new is a signal.
• The description is generic: no team, no manager, no start date, no concrete tasks — just "we're always looking for talent".
• There's no pay information in a country that has already brought in the EU Pay Transparency Directive, which gives applicants the right to the starting pay or range before the interview.
• The company has announced a hiring freeze or layoffs while the ad stays up.
• The only "interview" is an automated one, with no named person at any stage — especially from a company you can't find much about.
• After an interview, nothing: no rejection, no update, no reply to a polite follow-up.

Platforms are starting to help. LinkedIn is piloting verification badges on job posts — the company page is verified and the poster has verified they work there — but only some jobs have them yet, so a missing badge proves nothing on its own.

AI interviews and your data: your rights in the EU

Whether the vacancy was real or not, an EU employer that collected your CV, recordings or test answers must follow the GDPR. That gives you concrete tools:

• Right of access (Article 15): you can ask whether the company processes your personal data, get a copy, and learn the purposes it was used for — which is how you find out whether your interview was used for anything other than hiring.
• Deadline and cost (Article 12): the company must answer without undue delay and within one month, extendable by two further months only where necessary, and free of charge.
• Right to erasure (Article 17): you can ask for your data to be deleted once it is no longer needed for the purpose it was collected for — for example, after the hiring process ends.
• Automated decisions (Article 22): you have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing that significantly affects you, such as a rejection with no human involved.

The EU AI Act adds two more layers. AI used to place targeted job ads, filter applications and evaluate candidates is classified as high-risk; after the AI Omnibus that entered into force on 27 July 2026, those high-risk rules apply from 2 December 2027. And since 2 February 2025, the Act has banned AI systems that infer people's emotions in the workplace, except for medical or safety reasons.

Do any laws ban ghost jobs?

Not in the EU, as of October 2026. There is no EU-wide rule against advertising a role you don't intend to fill. The closest levers are the Pay Transparency Directive's pay-information rights, the GDPR and the AI Act.

• Ontario, Canada, is the clearest example of a rule: since 1 January 2026, employers with 25 or more employees must state when a public job posting is not for an existing vacancy, and must tell interviewed applicants whether a hiring decision has been made within 45 days of their last interview.
• In the United States, bills targeting ghost jobs were introduced in California, Kentucky and New Jersey; as of a Delaware legislative brief in August 2025, no federal or state law explicitly prohibited them.
• In New Zealand, the petition behind the October 2026 headlines asks Parliament to ban such ads; the main local job sites told RNZ they did not consider ghost jobs a material issue on their platforms.

How to spend your applications where the hires are

You can't eliminate ghost jobs, but you can stop them from eating your week:

• Apply through the company's own careers page when you can, and favour ads posted in the last two to three weeks.
• Look for a person: a named hiring manager or recruiter you can find on LinkedIn, or a referral from someone inside. Real vacancies usually have an owner.
• Ask early. A short, polite question — "is this role actively being hired for, and what's the timeline?" — costs nothing and is often answered honestly.
• Track every application with its posting date, contact and follow-up date, and set a cut-off: no reply two weeks after a follow-up means move on.