The cycle of heartbreak is familiar to job seekers everywhere: They see an ad for a role with great pay and potential, spend time customizing a cover letter and resume, hit submit, and then…nothing.
Sure, applications sometimes fall into a black hole. But in as many as one in five cases, the company has no real intention of filling the supposed opening. Months later, the same ad might still be up, but the job itself remains a phantom.
These so-called ghost jobs are a longtime source of frustration and anguish for people slogging through an increasingly anonymous and impersonal job-search process. That anger is now spilling over into state legislatures, where lawmakers around the country are trying to stop them.
Legislators in New York and Pennsylvania proposed bills this year that would require employers to list hiring timelines and remove job ads after roles are filled. In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Senate candidate, last month opened an investigation into LinkedIn, which he said has advertised and profited from fake job ads.
“When people are putting the time and effort into applying, there’s a reasonable expectation that there is a job out there,” said Jim Prokopiak, a member of Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives whose bill would require employers to list accurate hiring intentions and establish timelines to remove posts.
Some companies post less-than-real ads to build a pipeline for jobs that might open up someday or in case they reel in a dream candidate too good to pass up. On social media and elsewhere, job seekers theorize about other reasons: Some think employers are posting fake roles to convince investors and employees that they are healthy and growing, or to harvest data.
The practice is growing as it becomes faster, cheaper and easier for employers to post jobs online. Around 19% of jobs advertised on digital job boards in the second quarter were ghost jobs, according to Greenhouse, a hiring platform that examined its clients’ job postings. That included any posting that received at least one application but led to no hiring activity such as job-test submissions or scheduled interviews.
Heather Sanford, a 44-year-old marketing professional in the Austin, Texas, area, has been looking for work since her last contract role ended in May 2025. She’s applied for more than 3,000 jobs, she said, while slowly draining the nearly $40,000 in savings she once had. She has cut down on meals and is moving in with her father in the coming weeks to stretch her dollars further.
Sanford checks LinkedIn and other job boards for openings and applies to anything in her field or anywhere she thinks her skills are transferrable. In many cases, she doesn’t receive a response and then notices the ad is soon reposted.
“If you’ve posted a job and you have 500 applicants, are you telling me not one or two or three are qualified?” she said. “Are you looking for a unicorn? Or is it not a real job?”
The New York state bill, approved by both houses of the legislature, calls for employers to disclose when they expect an advertised role to be filled and levies fines for violations. A spokeswoman for Gov. Kathy Hochul said she’ll review the legislation when it gets to her desk. In Pennsylvania, Prokopiak’s bill moved to the state House’s Labor and Industry Committee in the spring.
Paxton, the Texas attorney general, is seeking documents, data and internal communications from LinkedIn, saying the platform might be misleading paying customers by failing to disclose that some of its job postings don’t represent genuine hiring opportunities.
“Our policies require that jobs posted be authentic and accurately represented. For many jobs posted on LinkedIn, we also display the company’s response time and whether they’re currently reviewing candidates, which helps job seekers know if it is a current, active job opportunity,” the company said.
Ghost jobs generally don’t show up in government labor statistics, which are based on surveys that ask employers to include only jobs that could start within 30 days and for which they are actively recruiting outside candidates. In June, U.S. job openings slipped to 7.4 million, according to the Labor Department.
Even some of those jobs don’t get filled, said Andy Nelesen, head of market strategy for the Americas at talent management firm SHL, which works with employers on recruiting.
“There’s a lot of economic uncertainty, all of which has employers having to sometimes pause jobs, hold them, or rethink them,” he said. “Maybe a job that was approved all of a sudden isn’t approved, or I’m trying to figure out how to fill it internally rather than externally. All of that is making this unpleasant experience a little more pronounced.”
Write to Lauren Weber at Lauren.Weber@wsj.com
