28% of Corporate Job Listings Sit Open for 90+ Days: Why Ghost Jobs Are Everywhere

A Overlooked Recruiting Problem

A recent report on "ghost jobs" sparked heated discussion on Hacker News, racking up 277 upvotes and 326 comments. The report's central finding points to an uncomfortable truth in the hiring market: 28% of positions on companies' official careers pages have been open for more than 90 days.

Ghost jobs are listings that sit on job boards indefinitely without any real intention of being filled. They might be kept up to project an image of growth, used to continuously collect resumes and build a talent pipeline, or simply forgotten by a recruiting team that never bothered to take them down. Whatever the reason, from a job seeker's perspective, these listings are black holes where applications go to die.

What 90 Days Actually Means

In a normal hiring process, a technical or functional role typically goes from posting to offer within 30 to 60 days. A position that's still open after 90 days has likely drifted far from any urgent hiring need.

The 28% figure in the report is no small share — it means that for every four jobs a candidate sees on a company's careers page, more than one may have been sitting dormant with no one actively following up. This directly distorts job seekers' perception of market opportunities: the careers page looks busy and full of possibility, while the number of genuinely accessible roles is far smaller.

It's worth noting that not all long-running postings are posted in bad faith. Some are what recruiters call "evergreen roles" — positions in sales, customer support, or other high-turnover functions where companies are genuinely recruiting on an ongoing basis. Others are placeholder posts where compensation or reporting structure hasn't been finalized. From a job seeker's perspective, though, these distinctions are nearly impossible to detect.

"Evergreen roles" is a specific term of art in recruiting, referring to positions where a company needs to continuously hire for the same type of role due to the nature of its business. Classic examples include customer service agents at large retail or e-commerce companies, sales representatives at SaaS firms, and software engineers at outsourcing firms — roles with inherently high turnover, or where the company is always in scale-up mode, making "always hiring" a genuinely legitimate posture. Evergreen roles and ghost jobs are nearly indistinguishable on the surface: both may run for months and be periodically refreshed. The key difference is that evergreen roles actually produce hiring decisions on a regular basis, while ghost jobs rarely advance any candidates to the interview stage. This is why using posting duration alone to gauge a listing's legitimacy has its limits — you also need to factor in the role type, industry context, and signals about the company's recent headcount activity.

Why Companies Are Happy to Leave Listings Up

From the company's perspective, there are several reasons to keep a position posted without urgency to fill it.

Projecting a growth signal is one of the most common motivations. Externally, a dense cluster of job postings conveys the impression that a company is expanding rapidly — which benefits brand perception, investor confidence, and even customer trust.

Building a talent pipeline is another consideration. Even without an immediate opening, continuously collecting resumes allows HR teams to quickly pull from a candidate pool when a real need arises, reducing future recruiting costs.

Then there's process inertia. Large organizations often lack effective lifecycle management for job postings. Once a role is published, it may linger indefinitely simply because no one is responsible for taking it down — even after the underlying need disappears.

The Hidden Cost Job Seekers Pay

Job seekers are the biggest losers in this information asymmetry. Every application sent to a ghost job comes with real investment — tailored resumes, cover letters, interview prep — in exchange for nothing. The deeper damage is psychological: repeated silence erodes confidence and leads candidates to misjudge their own competitiveness in the market.

The Hacker News discussion drew a flood of people sharing similar experiences. Among the 326 comments were widespread skepticism about the reliability of recruiting platform data and pointed criticism of corporate hiring integrity. This explains why a report exposing the "inflated" state of job listings resonated so quickly — it hit a nerve shared by a huge swath of job seekers.

How to Spot and Avoid Ghost Jobs

A few signals are worth watching for:

• Posting age: Pay attention to when a role was first listed. Be cautious of jobs that have been up for a long time and have been "reposted" to reset their timestamp.
• Vague descriptions: Roles with broad responsibilities, generic requirements, and no specific project context are more likely to be placeholder listings.
• Cross-reference multiple sources: Check LinkedIn, the company's careers page, and third-party job boards to see whether a posting is being updated in sync across platforms.
• Ask directly: In early outreach, simply asking about the urgency of the role and the current state of the team can filter out a significant number of dead-end opportunities.

From a structural standpoint, the ghost job phenomenon exposes a deeper problem: the hiring market lacks any real transparency mechanism. Third-party tools like unlisted.careers, which statistically track and disclose recruiting data, are emerging as a new weapon for job seekers fighting information asymmetry. When the "freshness" and authenticity of a listing can be quantified and made visible, companies will face greater external accountability for their recruiting behavior.

unlisted.careers is a third-party analytics tool built specifically to address the lack of transparency in recruiting data. Its core approach is to continuously scrape companies' official careers pages — rather than relying on secondary postings on aggregator platforms — to track the full lifecycle of each listing from publication to removal. Unlike LinkedIn, Indeed, or similar aggregators, it sources data directly from company careers pages, giving it a more accurate picture of a listing's true status — including whether it has gone through the common tactic of being deleted and reposted to reset its publication date. The emergence of tools like this is essentially filling a long-missing dimension in the job market: "listing freshness." Traditional job seekers can only see whether a role exists; they have no way of knowing how long it's been up or whether it's been refreshed. When this dimension is quantified and made public, candidates gain a meaningful filter before deciding whether a role is worth their time.

Closing Thoughts

The 28% figure holds up a mirror to the hollowness beneath the surface of a seemingly thriving hiring market. It's a reminder to job seekers that the number of listings on a careers page is not the same as the number of real opportunities — that careful judgment and cross-referencing are far more valuable than blasting out applications at scale. For companies, proactively removing stale listings and improving hiring transparency isn't just a matter of respect for candidates; it's a long-term investment in their own employer brand.