A ghost job is a posting for a role nobody is actively trying to fill. Some companies leave ads up to collect CVs, some forget to take them down, and some keep a busy careers page because it looks good to investors and customers. For you it means an evening spent on an application that nobody reads.

We can put a number on it. Every day we check the public job boards of 10,630 companies that hire through Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby, the software behind the careers pages of most tech companies and funded startups. On 15 November 2026 those boards listed 324,634 open jobs.

How old are the jobs you can apply to?

Posted more than Share of open jobs
60 days ago 51.7%
90 days ago 40.9%
180 days ago 25.8%
a year ago 14.0%

The typical open posting went up 65 days ago, and 83,039 of them have been up for more than six months.

Now compare that with the jobs that actually came down. Postings that closed since 8 November had been up for a median of 33 days, and 48.5% of them closed within a month. A role that someone is working to fill rarely sits there for half a year.

Old does not always mean fake

Some roles stay open all year on purpose: sales reps, nurses, drivers, support agents, anything a company hires in batches. A posting from March for “Account Executive, Mid-Market” may well be real. What should make you suspicious is one very specific role (“Senior Data Engineer, Payments Platform”) that has been up for eight months.

Then there are the honest non-jobs. 2,178 of the open postings (0.7%) are “general application” or “future opportunities” ads that collect CVs for no particular role. They at least say so.

How to check a posting before you apply

  1. Find the date on the company’s own careers page. Job boards like LinkedIn often show “reposted 2 days ago” on a job that has been up for months. The company’s own page (boards.greenhouse.io, jobs.lever.co, jobs.ashbyhq.com) is where the posting really lives.
  2. Search the exact title at that company. The same title in five cities, or under three slightly different names, is often a pipeline ad.
  3. Look for a pay range and a named team. Someone had to sit down and write those. A vague ad (“various locations, competitive pay”) costs nothing to leave up.
  4. Apply early. 33.0% of the jobs that closed recently came down within two weeks of going up. The first week is your best window.

Get the dates without checking by hand

We built ATS Jobs Search for exactly this. It searches all 324,634 open jobs at those 10,630 companies, and every row comes with the employer’s posted date, the day we first saw the job, and how many new roles the company opened this week. Postings older than 180 days are left out unless you ask for them. The Closed Jobs Tracker shows which jobs came down and how long they were up.

If you only want the numbers, a free monthly sample is on Kaggle and Hugging Face.

How we counted

Postings come from the public job board APIs that companies run for applicants. “Posted” is the date the employer published the job: Greenhouse’s first-published date, Lever’s creation date and Ashby’s published date. A job counts as closed when it disappears from its board; we have recorded closures since 2026-11-08. The numbers on this page refresh monthly, last on 2026-11-15.