Hundred applications later. The story of ghost jobs

After hours of searching, you stumble upon an entry-level position that appears to be the perfect match. You write a motivation letter, upload your crisp CV, and wait… Then, you wait even longer. After a couple of weeks, it becomes clear that you won't be getting this job. To add insult to injury, this entire process occurred without a single email from the company.

©Glendora Hyundai on flickr.com. No changes were made. Licensed by CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

What has happened to you?

You might think this happened because you were underqualified, or the company found someone more experienced than you. Don’t you worry; this position was likely fake or filled months ago. This phenomenon is known as ghost jobs and may affect up to one-third of job postings. Now, you can ask yourself, why would companies want to waste your time? To put it simply: your CV is an asset even without you as an employee. It includes data about your education, skills, and experience. Some companies also require you to fill in your salary expectations. As people like you apply for the role, the company gains insight into the talent pool and the cost of future expansion. Moreover, job listings send a signal to both the market and current employees. The latter are scared of being replaced, and the former is informed that the company’s operations are “expanding,” which could positively affect the corporation’s stock prices.

Is it advisable for companies, then?

Ghost jobs expose labour market inequalities. Employers generally hold far greater leverage than applicants: securing a job is crucial for a prospective employee’s standard of living, while companies, especially when hiring for entry-level positions, can usually function without filling one or two roles. Following the egoistic logic of economics, firms have incentives to exploit this imbalance for their own benefit. From that perspective, the practice may appear rational. However, this reasoning overlooks the significant drawbacks of ghost jobs for the companies that use them.

The most immediate problem is the loss of credibility. Employers that repeatedly post roles without genuine hiring intent risk damaging their reputation among job seekers. Over time, this can lead to fewer applications even for legitimate vacancies. Ghost jobs are particularly prevalent on large platforms such as Indeed and LinkedIn. If job seekers begin to distrust these platforms due to an abundance of misleading postings, they may disengage altogether. This would harm employers as well, since these platforms provide broad exposure and access to large talent pools. The consequences would be especially severe for lesser-known firms, whose career pages are not widely known. Such companies may then be forced either to accept lower-quality hires or to invest additional resources in marketing and employer-branding efforts to attract candidates.

A further consequence is the erosion of trust at the market level. If investors, analysts, or policymakers begin to view job-posting data as unreliable, they may discount vacancy signals altogether. This would eliminate one of the perceived advantages of ghost jobs, signalling growth, and could even lead to overcorrection, where genuine postings are ignored along with deceptive ones. These issues are compounded by the difficulty of distinguishing real vacancies from ghost listings, which amplifies uncertainty for all market participants.

There are also potential legal risks. Although ghost jobs are not explicitly illegal under EU or U.S. law, companies that use them primarily to collect and analyse applicant data may face legal consequences. In the EU, such practices may violate the GDPR, which requires that personal data be collected for specific, explicit, and legitimate purposes. Using job postings merely to harvest applicant data without transparent disclosure would likely fail this standard. In the United States, the situation is less clear-cut. At the federal level, enforcement would likely fall to the Federal Trade Commission, whose consumer-protection mandate could be interpreted to cover deceptive recruitment practices. At the state level, rules vary: for example, the California Consumer Privacy Act restricts the collection of applicant data to genuine employment considerations. Additionally, California Assembly Bill AB 1251 would explicitly prohibit ghost job postings, though it has not yet been enacted. To date, there are no widely reported cases of companies being fined specifically for posting ghost jobs. Now that we have examined both the employee and employer perspectives, we can turn to the broader picture.

Are ghost jobs the signal of a bad economic environment, or are they creating it?

At first glance, the labour market in both the EU and the United States appears relatively strong. Unemployment in both regions remains below historical averages, and nominal wage growth is positive, at approximately 3.5% in the EU and 3.76% in the U.S., according to the most recent data. However, in the United States, this wage growth is below its long-term average, and during several months of 2025, inflation outpaced nominal wage increases, resulting in stagnant or declining real wages. Much of this can be explained by the normal labour-market cycle: following the post-pandemic surge in labour demand, the economy is now cooling.

Unemployment rate in the US. Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

There is, however, another factor that cannot be ignored: artificial intelligence. Its impact is uneven across demographics and sectors, and it is particularly relevant for recent graduates seeking entry-level, white-collar positions. Several data points illustrate this. Youth unemployment in the United States increased in both 2024 and 2025 and has not returned to pre-pandemic levels, still exceeding 10%. More strikingly, for the first time, the unemployment rate of recent graduates has exceeded the national average after the pandemic. At the sectoral level, entry-level hiring in IT declined by roughly 50% from the pre-pandemic levels. In finance, a similar trend is evident: for example, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon stated at the World Economic Forum that the firm expects to hire fewer people in the coming years.

At first sight, these trends may seem unrelated to the phenomenon of ghost jobs, but the connection is deeper than it appears. Historically, firms relied on entry-level hiring to test labour-market conditions and identify emerging skill sets. With AI-driven automation and greater availability of labour data, companies can now obtain this information without actually hiring junior employees. At the same time, AI has rendered some entry-level roles obsolete. While this may seem beneficial in the short term, it creates a long-term risk: without a pipeline of junior workers, firms may face severe shortages of qualified senior employees. This is especially problematic because advanced roles will remain in high demand, as AI systems require supervision and cannot execute more complicated tasks.

Ghost jobs also contribute to a broader climate of uncertainty. For job seekers, the mechanism is straightforward: applicants cannot know whether a position exists, and silence after applying fosters frustration and pessimism about economic conditions. This perception can reduce consumption and, at scale, contribute to economic slowdown. The same uncertainty affects markets and policymakers. Job-posting data is widely used by investors, governments, and central banks to assess the state of the economy. When this data is distorted by ghost jobs, it becomes unreliable, increasing the risk of misinformed policy decisions.

Economic confidence has already been falling in recent years, and an additional source of noise in economic data can push the economy towards panic. With declining data quality and less reliable economic models, central banks and governments may struggle to respond effectively to downturns. The good news is that ghost jobs are relatively easy to address by imposing new regulations or using already existing law to combat them. Whether policymakers will make the right choice remains to be seen.