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Data · updated monthly

The ghost job list

Every few weeks somebody starts a crowdsourced list of companies posting ghost jobs. The instinct is right. The format is wrong. Worth explaining why before we hand you something better.

Updated 2026-08-03 · written by the Sendout team, who built the tool this page is about

The direct answer: a fixed list of ghost-job companies goes stale faster than it gets built. It also blames the wrong unit. Ghosting happens at the posting level, not the company level.

The same employer can run one urgent req with a named hiring manager, plus eleven evergreen listings nobody's touched since spring.

Blocklisting that company loses you the real job.

Leaving it off tells you nothing about the other eleven.

What we publish instead

We keep a first-seen ledger. Every posting we scan gets recorded the first time we see it, keyed on company and title. Then again every time it's back.

That ledger holds 4,658 postings. Of those, 307, or 6.6 percent, came back at least once inside fourteen days.

Each time, they looked new.

Fourteen days isn't long enough to catch the worst of it. A role reposted quarterly needs a quarter of watching. That number'll climb as the ledger ages, and we'll publish it either way.

The monthly number

Between 16 July and 1 August 2026 we tracked 551 postings across 428 companies. Here's what we found.

• 222 of 551 (40.3%) had any reachable contact at all.
• 329 of 551 (59.7%) had none. No named person, no working address, nobody.
• 152 (27.6%) named a poster on the listing itself.
• 7 (1.3%) carried a signal that someone was hiring right then.

That last one should change how you job hunt. That's one in seventy-seven.

The 4,658-posting ledger and the 551-posting sample are two different windows on the same problem.

The full method, including what we don't claim, is on the Ghost Job Index. It's updated monthly.

Why the crowdsourced lists keep dying

• They're unfalsifiable. One unanswered application is not evidence a posting was fake.
• They go stale in weeks. A req that's frozen in March is filled by June. Nobody updates the row.
• They're legally exposed. Naming a company as a fraud, on anecdote alone, is how a spreadsheet gets a letter.
• They can't see the thing that matters. Whether a human is reachable behind a posting isn't visible to the person filling in the form.

We'd rather give you a check you can run on the posting in front of you. Thirty seconds, before you spend an hour.

Check a posting before you spend an hour on it

Two free things, no signup on either.

• The ghost job checker takes a posting link. It opens the posting, reads the real date off the page, looks for reposted copies and checks whether anyone at the company is reachable. You get a ghost score out of 100 with the reasons listed.
• The Ghost Job Index is the underlying study, updated monthly. 551 postings, what share had a human behind them, and how we measured it.

What makes Sendout different

Three things. They happen to be the three biggest complaints people have about every other tool in this category.

• It works from your own accounts. Applications and outreach go out from your real email and LinkedIn. Human pace. Your voice. Your reputation carries them, not a vendor's server IP. Nothing sprays.
• It fills real application forms. Sendout completes actual ATS applications on Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby and Workday. It answers the open-ended questions in your voice. This is a real submission, not a browser autofill you still have to babysit.
• It filters ghost jobs. Roughly one in five postings is stale or a repost nobody reads. Sendout drops those and pursues live openings where a real hiring person can be reached.

When a recruiter replies, the conversation lands in one inbox. You can take over any thread with a click. You show up to the conversations. Sendout does the busywork.

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