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Guide · 2026

How to tell if a job posting is fake

Two very different things get called fake. One is a scam. The other is a real company advertising a job it has no plan to fill.

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

People searching this are asking one of two questions. Mixing them up wastes an afternoon.

A scam posting is fraud. Someone wants your bank details, your ID, or a payment up front. The company might not exist.

A ghost job is different. It's far more common, too.

The company's real. The listing's real. Nobody is going to fill it. It's collecting CVs, or it was approved in March and never taken down.

Run the scam checks first. Money's attached to those.

Then run the ghost checks, because that second set is where almost all of your genuinely wasted applications are quietly going every week.

Scam checks that settle it fast

• They ask for money. Training fees, equipment deposits, background-check charges. A real employer pays for those. This one check ends most cases.
• They want documents before an interview. Passport scans or bank details up front isn't onboarding. It's harvesting.
• The interview lives on a chat app. Telegram or WhatsApp instead of a scheduled call with a named person.
• The email domain doesn't match. A gmail address, or a lookalike domain with one extra letter.
• An offer arrives without a real interview. Nobody hires a stranger after a 10 minute chat.
• The salary sits far above the range. Check two other postings for the same title. A big outlier is bait.

Any one of those is enough. You don't have to prove fraud. You just need a better use of the next hour.

Ghost checks, where the volume is

This one's harder. Nothing looks wrong.

The company's real. The page loads. The role reads normally.

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 showed a signal that anyone was hiring for that seat right then.

• The posted date keeps moving. Same company, same title, a fresh "posted today" every few weeks. That's a repost cycle.
• It's been open past 60 days. Real requisitions close. They get filled, frozen or cancelled.
• Nobody's named. No recruiter, no hiring manager, nobody on the careers page either.
• The salary band spans two levels. A range that wide means the level was never decided.
• The wording is a collector. "Talent community", "general application", "all levels". Those are nets, not seats.
• It could be any company. No product, no team, no specifics. That copy was written to attract, not to hire.

The check nobody runs

Every list like this stops at the posting. The better question is whether a human sits behind it.

Can't find a named person connected to that role? Then your application lands in a queue that may have no reader.

That's the difference between a long shot and a waste.

A requisition that was approved back in March and quietly left online after the budget got pulled will still happily accept your application today and it will still never be read by a single human being.

Our free ghost job checker runs the whole set on any link. It reads the true posted date from the page's own structured data, not the card. It hunts for duplicate copies of the same role.

Then it scores the listing out of 100 and lists every signal it found.

It also says plainly what it couldn't check. No signup.

Ghost listings survive because nothing about them is illegal and nobody inside the company is ever meaningfully punished for leaving a dead requisition online for another six months while it quietly collects several hundred more CVs from people who needed the work.

A recruiter who has genuinely been told to fill a seat this quarter behaves completely differently from one running a pipeline exercise and that difference shows up most reliably in whether any named human at the company turns out to be findable and reachable at all.

Monthly numbers live in the Ghost Job Index.

When a posting passes

Passing means nothing we ran flagged it. It doesn't mean the job's real.

Any tool telling you otherwise is overselling.

What a clean result actually buys you is the confidence that the hour you are about to spend writing to a named person at that company is an hour going somewhere rather than an hour disappearing into a portal nobody has opened since spring.

So treat a pass as permission to spend real effort. Find the hiring manager. Write to them directly. Don't lean on the portal alone.

One posting with a reachable human beats ten that merely look fine.

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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