Most advice on this subject is vibes. Here is what can actually be checked from the outside, ordered by how much each signal is worth.
1. How long it has been up
This is the strongest signal available to you, and the cheapest to check. In a survey of 1,000 US job seekers published by Enhancv in March 2026, 27.2% named the age of a listing — active for three months or more — as the most reliable indicator that a role does not exist. It beat every other signal they were offered.
The logic is simple. A real requisition has a hiring manager waiting on it, and that person gets impatient. A listing that has sat untouched since spring is either filled, frozen, or was never a real opening.
2. Whether the same role keeps reappearing
A posting that is taken down and republished every few weeks is doing something other than hiring. Sometimes it is a board refreshing stale inventory. Sometimes it is a company keeping a pipeline warm. Either way, the requisition is not moving.
You can check this by searching the exact job title plus the company name and looking at the dates on the results. If three different boards show three different posting dates for what is obviously the same role, the freshest date is marketing, not fact.
3. Whether it came from the employer or an agency
Agency listings are not fake, but they are further from the truth. The agency may be working a real requisition, may be fishing for candidates to place elsewhere, or may be advertising a role that closed a month ago because the listing still generates applications.
Tell-tale signs: no company name, a description written in the third person about "our client", and a salary given as a wide band rather than a range.
4. Whether the description describes work or describes a person
Real requisitions are written by someone who knows what the job involves. They mention the team, the systems, the first project. Fabricated or recycled listings describe an idealised person: driven, passionate, a self-starter who thrives in ambiguity.
The test: after reading it, can you say what you would do on the first Monday? If not, nobody has thought about the role concretely.
5. Whether the salary is there at all
In markets without pay transparency law, most postings omit salary, so its absence tells you little. In markets where disclosure is required — Colorado, New York City, California, and increasingly the EU — a missing range is a real signal that something is off about the listing.
6. Whether the application route is the company's own system
An application link that goes to the company's own applicant tracking system is a good sign: someone configured a requisition in software the company pays for. A link to a generic form, a personal email address, or a third-party site that then asks for your details again is weaker.
What none of this tells you
None of these signals reveal intent. A company can have a genuine, funded, urgent requisition and still ghost you. A listing can be four months old because the hiring manager left and nobody cleaned up. The signals tell you where to spend your effort, not who is honest.
Our own view, which we publish because it constrains what we claim: we measure the date a posting was published and how long it has been visible. We do not know whether anyone is reading the applications, and we do not pretend to.
A one-minute check
- Look at the posting date. Older than sixty days without a re-post? Note it.
- Search the exact title plus company. Multiple dates for one role means the dates are unreliable.
- Read for the first Monday. If you cannot picture it, the role may not be defined.
- Check who is hiring: the employer or an agency.
- Check where the apply button goes.
- If the market requires pay disclosure and there is none, downgrade it.
Sources
- Enhancv, “The Phantom Market”, survey of 1,000 US job seekers, published March 2026
- Hunter Ng, “Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs”, arXiv:2410.21771, October 2024