The ghost-job economy is a reputation crisis the C-suite hasn’t priced yet.
27.4% of all U.S. job listings on LinkedIn are likely ghost jobs — postings for positions companies have no intention of filling. That number, from a Revelio Labs analysis, is not a fringe statistic. It is the new baseline of the public hiring conversation.
40% of companies admitted to posting fake listings in 2024, according to a Resume Builder survey. 30% had active ghost jobs running at the time of the survey. 81% of recruiters say their employers do it — 45% “regularly,” 48% “occasionally.” The Congressional Research Service has formally defined the practice. State legislators are drafting bills. The FTC’s Section 5 deceptive-practices authority is being floated as the enforcement hook.
The C-suite still treats ghost jobs as harmless optics. It is the single most underpriced reputation liability in corporate communications.
Why companies post them
The justifications are documented and consistent across surveys:
Project growth that is not happening
Keep current employees from feeling stuck on a stagnant team
Build a resume pool for hypothetical future hiring
Game search-result visibility on job boards
Collect competitor wage data
Inflate industry hiring statistics that get cited back
Each rationale sounds defensible in a HR meeting. None of them survive contact with a Glassdoor review, a Reddit thread, or a reporter who knows how to read a careers page.
The Israeli tech tell
The practice surfaced last week inside a Calcalist report on Israeli tech and currency pressure. Wall Street-listed Israeli companies privately admitted that many open reqs on their careers pages are “ghost jobs” intended to project business as usual — even as hiring has effectively been paused in Israel. Riskified, Pagaya, Oddity were named as having largely paused hiring.
That is not an Israeli phenomenon. That is the global phenomenon arriving in a market sensitive enough to surface it. Every comparable economy is running the same playbook.
The reputation cost — already accumulating
Ghost jobs are a slow-motion crisis because the damage is distributed across thousands of individual candidates rather than concentrated in a single news event. Each candidate who applies to a fake req, hears nothing, and figures out what happened becomes a long-term reputational liability.
The infrastructure for collective discovery already exists. GhostJobs.io. Reddit’s r/recruitinghell. Blind threads. Glassdoor reviews increasingly explicit about which companies post fake listings and which sit on applications. LinkedIn comment sections under careers-page posts.
The data is starting to compound:
Time-to-hire has stretched across most major job boards, with no corresponding rise in hires
Applicant ghosting complaints are the fastest-growing category in employer-review platforms
Federal scam reports related to job postings nearly tripled from 2020 to 2024
When the regulatory pendulum swings — and the early state bills suggest it will — the companies that built the deepest archives of ghost jobs will be the ones with the deepest exposure.
The communications failure underneath
The deeper problem: ghost jobs are usually a HR decision the communications team never sees. By the time a journalist or regulator surfaces a pattern, the comms function is reverse-engineering a defense for choices it had no input on.
Three protocols separate the companies that get this right:
One — comms reviews the careers page like it reviews the newsroom. Every public surface a company maintains carries the company’s voice. Open reqs are public statements. They should be governed like public statements.
Two — every open req has an expiration discipline. A role posted ninety days ago that is still “open” with no candidate motion is either a search problem or a ghost job. Both deserve attention. Neither should sit indefinitely.
Three — disclosure language for evergreen reqs. If a company genuinely uses an open posting to build a talent pool for future hiring, label it. “Evergreen role — accepting applications for future openings” is a real communications move and a real candidate-experience improvement. It also pre-empts the bad-faith reading.
The structural read
The ghost-job economy is what happens when comms abdicates a public surface and HR optimizes for an internal metric. The fix is not policy. The fix is putting the careers page back inside the communications perimeter — and treating every public posting as the company’s word.
Companies that solve this before the regulation arrives keep their hiring brand. The ones that don’t will spend a decade rebuilding it.
Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm. He is the publisher of Everything-PR and the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release.
Everything-PR is the intelligence platform for communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era. Thirty-plus publications. Publishing since 2009. Original reporting, research, and analysis — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question.
