Ghost Jobs: What They Are, How to Spot Them, and How to Protect Your Time

You tailored the CV, wrote the cover letter, and sent it. Four weeks later there is nothing: no interview, no rejection, not even the automatic acknowledgement. It is worth knowing that some of those adverts were never going to produce a reply from anyone, whatever you had written.

You cannot find out for certain which ones. What you can do is decide, in about ten minutes, how much of your time a particular advert deserves before you spend it. That is what the checklist below is for.

What a Ghost Job Is, and What Is Actually Known About Them

A ghost job is an advert that no one is hiring against: the role is filled, frozen, never existed, or exists only as a way of collecting CVs. The applicant does the work in good faith and there is no process at the other end.

Be careful with the percentages that circulate. Nobody audits every UK advert, so any national figure is an estimate built on someone's definition. The most solid number I have found comes from an applicant tracking system counting its own adverts: in its 2024 State of Job Hunting report, published on 10 December 2024, Greenhouse said that in any given quarter, 18 to 22 per cent of the jobs posted on the Greenhouse platform are classified as ghost jobs. The same report surveyed 2,500 workers in the US, UK and Germany, and three in five said they suspected they had encountered one.

So: common enough to change how you spend an hour, not common enough to explain away every silence. The other reason the odds are tight is simply that there are fewer jobs. The ONS estimated 702,000 UK vacancies in June to August 2026, down 8,000 on the quarter, with 2.5 unemployed people per vacancy in May to July (ONS, September 2026).

Why the Advert Is Still There

Most ghost jobs are not a deception aimed at you. They are a mixture of housekeeping and hedging:

• Nobody closed it. LinkedIn's own documentation says a job post stays open until the poster closes it manually, or until it automatically closes after six months, and that a reposted job is treated as a new post (LinkedIn Help: renewability and duration of a job posting). That is why an advert can be four months old, and why one that has been circulating since spring can still say it was posted this week.
• The recruiter left. Their adverts outlive them, on the board and on every aggregator that copied them.
• It went to an internal candidate. Many organisations advertise externally as a matter of policy even when the successful person already works there.
• The role was paused. A freeze or a budget cut mid-process stops the hiring, not the advert.
• It is a pipeline. The employer wants a pool of CVs for a role it expects to open, or an agency wants candidates on its books.
• It is a shop window. A long careers page makes an organisation look like it is growing.

Score the Advert Before You Spend an Hour on It

Open the advert you are considering and give it a mark against each line. No single signal decides anything; the point of adding them up is to stop one striking detail from carrying the whole judgement.

What I would do with the total:

• 0 to 2 — apply properly. Tailor the CV, write the letter, send it through the employer's own form.
• 3 to 5 — spend ten minutes, not an hour. Send the nearest CV you already have, with the first page matching the essential criteria and no bespoke cover letter. Then do the checks in the next section, and upgrade the application if the role turns out to be live.
• 6 or more — skip it, unless you can find a person at the organisation to write to. At that point you are applying to the person, not the advert, which is a different and better move.

Three things that look suspicious and are not. Easy Apply is used by plenty of real employers. No salary is still the norm in the UK private sector, so it only counts where publishing a range is the convention, as it is across the Civil Service, the NHS and local government. And a high applicant count means competition, not a fake: a genuinely open role with 400 applicants is a real job you probably will not get, which is a different problem.

The Ten Minutes of Checks

In rough order of how much each one tells you:

• Find the role on the employer's own careers page. This is the check that decides most cases. If the aggregator has it and the employer does not, you are usually looking at a copy of something that has already closed. Apply through the employer's page when it is there.
• Look for a closing date and a named person. An advert with both is being managed by someone. An advert with neither may be nobody's job.
• Check whether the named recruiter still works there, and whether they have posted the same role repeatedly over months.
• Search the company's recent news for redundancies, a takeover or a freeze. A role advertised in the middle of a redundancy consultation deserves the sceptical reading.
• Ask someone. If you know anyone there, one message answers the question better than every other check combined.
• For an agency advert, phone the consultant and ask two questions: who the employer is, and when they last spoke to them about this role. A consultant working a live vacancy answers both easily.

Agency Adverts Have Rules Behind Them

This is the part most advice leaves out. In the UK, an agency advertising a vacancy is regulated. Regulation 27 of the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003 says an agency must not issue an advertisement for a vacancy unless it has details of the specific position and the authority of the hirer concerned to find people for it. Every advert it issues must give the agency's full name and say whether the work is permanent or temporary, and any advert quoting a rate of pay must also state the nature of the work, the location, and the minimum experience or qualifications needed.

So an agency advert with no employer, no location and no duties is not just unhelpful. It is short of what the regulations require, and it is reasonable to ask the consultant which client the role is with. Those regulations are enforced by the Fair Work Agency, which began operating on 7 April 2026 in place of the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate and enforces the Employment Agencies Act 1973 and the 2003 Regulations. Set your expectations honestly before you write to it: the issues it lists as the ones it investigates are about withheld pay, missing contracts and fees charged to find work, not adverts. Report a fake advert to put it on the record, not to get your own application answered.

If You Have Already Applied

Follow up once, on the same timetable as any other application. Five working days after the closing date, or ten working days after applying if there was no closing date. One message, in the same thread as the original. The wording is in the job application email guide.

At four weeks with no acknowledgement, close it. Move it to an inactive column in your application tracker and take it out of your active count. Anything that arrives after that is a bonus rather than a hope you are carrying around.

Then check whether ghost jobs are really your problem. If the silence is concentrated on old adverts from aggregators, this is your fix. If tailored applications and referrals are going quiet too, the cause is somewhere else, and the diagnostic in the job search strategy guide will find it faster than any amount of advert forensics. The most reliable protection against ghost jobs is not detection at all: it is spending more of your week on employers you have chosen and people you have contacted, and less on scrolling a feed of adverts that chose you.

Frequently Asked Questions