TL;DR — A ghost job is a listing you can apply to that will not result in a hire: a talent pool collecting resumes for nothing specific, an evergreen posting a company never closes, or a filled role left up. They are not always cynical — most are administrative neglect — but applying to one costs you the same hour as applying to a real job.
A ghost job is a posting that looks like an opening and is not one. The application form works, the company is real, and there is no role at the end of it. Four common shapes:
Talent pools and talent communities. Titled "Talent Community", "Expression of Interest" or "General Application". Explicitly not a vacancy — the company is collecting resumes against roles that may open later. Honest, but a different activity from applying for a job.
Evergreen requisitions. A company that continuously hires one role — support, sales development, delivery — leaves the ad up permanently. Sometimes a real opening exists behind it; often the pipeline is already full.
Filled roles nobody took down. The most common kind by far, and the least deliberate. Someone got hired; nobody closed the requisition.
Pipeline-building ads. Posted to gauge the market, to look like the company is growing, or to keep a bench warm.
How many are out there?
We index 42,612 live remote roles. On 1 September 2026, 174 of them were postings that could not result in a hire — talent pools, "Expression of Interest" catch-alls, general applications and one listing whose own title read US TEST JOB 2026 - DO NOT APPLY.
That is under half a percent, which is worth being honest about: ghost jobs are a real problem but not a majority of the market. What makes them expensive is that they are indistinguishable from real listings until you have read them — and about half of the ones we found had been given a normal-looking job category, so they were being ranked and shown as ordinary openings.
The harder-to-count category is the third one above — filled roles nobody took down. No title gives those away; only the passage of time does, which is why a posting's age is worth as much attention as its content.
How to spot one before you spend an hour on it
- Read the title literally. "Talent Community", "Expression of Interest", "General Application", "Future Opportunities", "Join Our Network" all say, correctly, that there is no specific job.
- Check the posting date, not the "updated" date. A role first published four months ago that a board still shows as fresh is a signal. Employers routinely edit reqs, which resets "updated" without meaning anything.
- Look for a team, a manager, a scope. Real openings describe what you would own. Ghost listings describe the company.
- Be wary of a role open in every location at once. One req advertised across eight cities is often a pipeline exercise.
- No salary and no specifics together. Either alone is common; both together, on a months-old posting, is a pattern.
What to do about it
Nothing you can do stops companies posting these, so the only lever is where you spend your hours. Prioritise postings that are recent, specific and closed-loop — a named team, a scope, a hiring manager. Treat talent pools as what they are: a five-minute resume drop, not an application worth a tailored cover letter.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are ghost jobs illegal?
No. Posting a role you do not intend to fill immediately is legal almost everywhere, and most ghost listings are administrative neglect rather than deception — a filled role nobody closed.
How can I tell if a job posting is still open?
Check the company's own careers page rather than the board that showed it to you. If the role is gone there but still live on an aggregator, the aggregator is stale. A posting's original publication date is a better staleness signal than any "updated" timestamp.
Should I ever apply to a talent pool?
Sometimes — it is a low-cost way onto a recruiter's radar at a company you genuinely want. Just budget it as five minutes, not the hour a tailored application deserves.
Does RemoteHunt filter out ghost jobs?
We filter the ones a title can identify — talent pools, expressions of interest, general applications — and hide them from the feed rather than scoring them as real roles. We also date every posting by when the employer published it, not when we found it, so a months-old req cannot pass as fresh.
RemoteHunt scores every remote job against your resume and hides the ones that cannot result in a hire — so your applications go where someone is actually reading. Start for free.