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Free tool · 2026

The free ghost job checker

Paste a posting link. Get a score out of 100 with every signal listed, plus an honest list of what could not be checked.

Updated 2026-08-04 · written by the Sendout team, who built the tool this page is about

Most "is this job real" advice hands you a checklist and then leaves all of the actual work to you.

So we built the checklist into a tool instead.

It runs every check on this page in about the time it takes you to read one paragraph of the posting you were already suspicious about in the first place.

It's free. There's no signup, no email wall and no trial to expire on you.

Open the ghost job checker and paste any posting link.

It takes about five seconds.

What it actually reads

It goes and fetches the posting the moment you paste it. This isn't a database lookup against something we scanned last month.

• The true posted date. Most job pages carry structured data for Google with the real date inside it. Lever's API exposes the exact moment the requisition was created. That's the date a listing can't quietly reset.
• Duplicate copies. A live search for the same role at the same company. Two or three copies up at once with dates weeks apart is the repost pattern caught in the act.
• Our own first-seen ledger. Whatever date the page shows, it can't reset when we first saw it. Every check anyone runs adds to that ledger.
• The wording. Talent-pool language, all-levels catch-alls and placeholder text. On 29 July we caught a live posting whose whole description was lorem ipsum.
• Whether anyone is reachable. This is the one nothing else does. Other checkers ask whether the posting is dead. We ask whether a human sits behind it.

Reading your score

Every signal carries points. Ghost evidence adds. Signs of life subtract.

Under 25 means nothing we ran flagged it.

That's the good band.

It still doesn't mean the role is definitely being filled by somebody this quarter, only that none of the tests we ran found anything wrong with the listing you handed us.

25 to 54 means enough is off to treat it as a long shot.

55 and up means don't spend your morning on it.

Move on.

The middle band between those two is where most of the interesting cases sit, because a posting scoring 40 usually has one genuinely worrying signal sitting next to several perfectly clean ones.

Two honest caveats come with every result. A low score means we found nothing against the posting rather than proving the job's real. The result also lists what we couldn't check so a score built on two signals never dresses up as one built on six.

Why the reachability check matters most

We tracked 551 live postings between 16 July and 1 August 2026.

Of those, 329 had nobody reachable behind them. That's 59.7 percent.

Only 7 carried a signal that anybody was hiring for that seat right then.

That's 7 out of 551.

Those numbers are the reason the reachability check exists at all, because a posting can pass every date and wording test we have while still being attached to nobody at the company who could actually hire you.

A posting can have a perfectly fresh date and clean wording while still sitting in a queue nobody has opened since spring. That's exactly why a date check on its own was never going to be enough.

The month by month numbers are in the Ghost Job Index.

What it can't do

Indeed and Glassdoor block automated reads. We say so instead of pretending. You can paste the company and title by hand instead.

Some pages expose no date at all. When that happens the result says the date was unchecked rather than guessing at one.

And a clear result is never a promise.

It means the checks we ran came back clean.

We would rather tell you plainly which of the six checks actually ran than hand you a confident number built quietly on two of them while implying it was built on all six.

What to do with a bad score

Close the tab. You'll spend that hour better somewhere else.

If the role genuinely matters to you, skip the portal entirely. Find the hiring manager and write to them directly. A posting nobody's working is still attached to a team that might well be hiring.

You can also browse roles that already passed the filter on our live jobs board.

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