Companies posting jobs but not hiring

It isn't a conspiracy and it isn't rare. It's mostly incentives. A listing costs a company almost nothing to leave up, and costs you an hour every time you answer one.

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

The direct answer: it's common. The honest number depends on what you count.

The published estimates put ghost jobs at roughly 18 to 22 percent. Those count listings that are dead outright. Filled, cancelled, or never real.

We measured something harsher. Of 551 postings we tracked between 16 July and 1 August 2026, across 428 companies, only 222 had a reachable human behind them.

That leaves 329, or 59.7 percent, where nobody could be reached at all.

Those two numbers aren't in conflict. About a fifth of listings are dead. Three fifths are unanswerable. For an applicant the outcome is the same.

Why a company does this

Pipelining. Collect CVs now for a role that might be approved next quarter. Cheap. And it works, for them.
The req froze and nobody cleaned up. Taking a listing down is someone's job and nobody's priority.
Looking like they're growing. A careers page with 40 openings signals health to customers and investors.
Testing the market. What does this role cost right now? A live posting is the cheapest salary survey there is.
An internal candidate is already picked. Policy says the role gets posted externally. It was. That changes nothing about who gets it.
Agency sourcing. A recruiter builds a candidate list against a role they don't have a signed mandate for.

None of those reasons involve reading your application.

How to recognise one

Six signals, roughly in order of how much you can trust them.

The date keeps moving. Same role, same company, a fresh "posted today" every few weeks. A posting date tells you when the listing was last touched, not when the role opened.
Open past 60 days. Real reqs close. We measure age from the first time we ever saw a posting. A repost can't reset that.
Nobody is named. No recruiter, no hiring manager, nothing on the listing or the careers page.
Pipeline wording. Talent community, general application, multiple locations, all levels.
A salary band spanning two seniority levels. The level hasn't been decided, which usually means the req hasn't really been approved.
The description could be any company. No product, no team, no specifics.

What it costs you, in hours

Take a normal week. Say you send 20 applications. Each costs you 25 minutes between tailoring, the form and the open-ended questions. That's over eight hours.

At our measured rate, roughly 12 of those 20 had nobody behind them. Five of those eight hours went to an empty room.

That's the actual argument for filtering before you apply rather than applying wider.

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.

Frequently asked

Is posting a job you are not hiring for illegal?

Generally no. That's a big part of why it's common. Some places have started requiring salary ranges and, in a few cases, that postings come down when a role is filled. Enforcement is thin. Treat it as something to detect rather than something to appeal.

How is your 59.7 percent different from the usual 18 to 22 percent?

They measure different things. The published figure counts listings that are dead: filled, cancelled or never real. We measured whether a reachable human exists behind the posting, meaning a named person or a mailbox-verified address that accepts mail.

A careers@ catch-all doesn't count. A posting with no reachable contact isn't proven dead. It's proven unanswerable.

Should I still apply if I think it might be a ghost posting?

If the role is a genuinely good fit and the application is quick, sure. The mistake is spending an hour tailoring for a posting carrying three ghost signals. Check first, then decide where the hour goes.

Do big companies do this more than small ones?

In our sample the pattern tracked posting volume more than company size. Places that post a lot of roles have more stale ones sitting open, because cleanup scales worse than posting does.

Our checker reports how many roles we track at a company and how many reappear after going quiet.

Apply only to the real ones

Sendout finds fresh, real openings and applies for you. Everything goes out from your own email and LinkedIn, every day. You just take the conversations.

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