69,500 open roles · 413 employers
What is a ghost job?
A ghost job is a listing the employer has no intention of filling. It is a real phenomenon and a genuinely miserable thing to run into after a week of waiting on a reply.
It is also, strictly, a claim about intent — and nobody outside the company can see intent. So this page is not going to tell you which listings are ghosts. What it can give you is the part that is checkable, and it turns out to be most of what you needed.
The checkable part
Every listing carries a publish date in the employer’s own hiring system. Job boards almost never show it. Read across 413 employers right now:
- 2,525
- open more than a year, still being advertised
- 42%
- of everything open has been sitting over two months
- 46 days
- the middle role’s age — half are older
The oldest role still open anywhere in the corpus is Software Engineer - Motion Planning at Zoox, published 8 February 2016 and still on their board 10y 7m later.
What a long-open listing does and does not tell you
It does not tell you the job is fake. Requisitions stay open for plenty of dull reasons: a pipeline role kept live on purpose, a re-scope, a freeze nobody took the posting down for, a filled job whose board entry was forgotten.
What it does tell you is where your afternoon is best spent. Ten applications is a real cost — a couple of hours, and a tailored letter each. Knowing that five of the ten have been advertised for over 46 days changes which ten you pick, and that is a decision you can make without anyone speculating about intent on your behalf.
Where the middle role has been waiting longest
Employers with at least 25 open roles, ranked by the age of their median listing. Standing pipeline requisitions are excluded, so these are ordinary reqs that have simply been open a long time.
Questions people ask
- How can I tell if a job posting is real?
- From the outside, you cannot tell for certain — and anybody who says otherwise is guessing. What you can check is how long it has been advertised. A role posted last week is an ordinary open req. A role the employer has been advertising continuously since 2019 is telling you something, whatever the reason behind it.
- Why do companies leave jobs posted for months?
- Several ordinary reasons and a few less ordinary ones: an evergreen requisition kept open to collect a pipeline, a role that keeps getting re-scoped, a hiring freeze nobody took the posting down for, an agency-facing listing, or a job that was filled while the board entry was forgotten. None of those are visible from outside. The elapsed time is.
- Is a job posting still active if it has been up a long time?
- It is still on the employer’s own hiring system, which is the only thing anyone outside can verify — and it is the same thing every job board is telling you when it shows you that listing. The difference here is that we also tell you the date it went up.
- What counts as a ghost job?
- The usual definition is a posting the employer has no intention of filling. That is a statement about intent, so it cannot be measured from the outside. fable12 does not label any listing a ghost job, because doing so would mean inventing the one fact we do not have.
- Where does fable12 get the dates?
- From the employer’s own applicant tracking system — Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever, Workday and the rest — read directly, not resold. Where a system publishes more than one date we take the one that means first published, not the one that moves every time a recruiter edits a word.
Check one yourself
Search any employer and every role comes back with the date they published it. Nothing here is a score or an estimate; how we know sets out where each date comes from and which employers are missing because their boards publish no date worth standing behind.