“Ghost job” means a posting advertised without an intention to fill it. Companies do it to build a talent pipeline, to signal growth, to satisfy an internal policy that a role be advertised before an internal candidate takes it, or because nobody remembered to take the listing down.
The figure you see quoted is usually “one in five”. It has a specific source, and knowing that source tells you what the number does and does not cover.
Where the 20% comes from
The academic reference is Hunter Ng, Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs, submitted to arXiv in October 2024. Using a dataset from Glassdoor and an LLM-BERT classification approach, the study finds that up to 21% of job ads may be ghost jobs, more so in specialised industries and larger firms.
The paper goes further than the headline: it argues ghost postings help explain the recent disconnect in the Beveridge curve — the long-standing relationship between vacancies and unemployment that stopped behaving as expected over the past fifteen years.
Up to 21% of job ads may be ghost jobs, and this is particularly prevalent in specialized industries and in larger firms.
Note the hedge: up to. The popular retelling drops it and reports a flat “1 in 5”.
Why other estimates disagree
| Estimate | Method | What it actually measures |
|---|---|---|
| ~21% | Classification of Glassdoor postings | Postings whose text patterns resemble non-hiring ads |
| ~18% | Applicant tracking system outcome data | Requisitions that closed without a hire |
| ~30% | Gap between advertised openings and recorded hires | A statistical residual, not individual listings |
| 40% | Survey of 649 hiring managers | Self-reported behaviour, in a category people under-report |
| 50% | Survey of 1,000 hiring managers | Self-reported intent to build a pipeline |
These are not competing measurements of the same thing. A survey asking managers whether they have ever posted a role they were not filling will always produce a larger number than a method that classifies individual listings, because one manager admitting the practice covers many postings.
What changed, and when
The topic peaked as news rather than as a phenomenon. Measured by attention on Hacker News — one reasonable proxy for what technical audiences are arguing about — stories with the phrase in the headline collected 1,484 points across 38 stories in 2024, and 1,403 points across only 16 stories in 2025: fewer articles, far more engagement each. Through August 2026, 22 stories collected 433 points.
Read that as the topic moving from news to background knowledge. People stopped upvoting explanations because they no longer need one.
The part that gets ignored
Almost every well-known ghost job story is about the effect on candidates. The most-discussed stories in this space are about something else entirely: fake job offers as an attack vector. The single highest-scoring posting-related story on Hacker News is about a fabricated job offer that led to the Axie Infinity breach and a loss of over $600m. Others cover malware delivered inside take-home assignments, and fabricated interviews treated as securities fraud.
If you are a security team rather than a job seeker, the ghost job problem looks completely different, and nobody in the job data business is looking at it.
What we can and cannot see
We publish how long postings stay open, because that is measurable from the outside. We cannot see inside a requisition. Anyone claiming to detect intent from a listing is selling a model of intent, not a measurement — and the honest version of that product would report a probability, not a verdict.
Sources
- Hunter Ng, arXiv:2410.21771, submitted 29 October 2024
- Attention measured against the Hacker News search index, August 2026