If you are in the position of trying to find a new job, of course you don't want to waste your time applying for these ghost jobs. But it turns out all those open job postings that you see online might not even be real. Ghost jobs are a phenomenon that have existed for a long time, but they've come to light much more in recent years and they've become much more of a significant issue in the job market. Four in 10 companies posted fake job listings in 2024, and three in 10 are currently advertising for a role that isn't real, according to a May survey from Resume Builder. The rise of ghost job posting definitely points to a cooling in the economy. We are seeing that employers are more hesitant to make that hire, and it just points to the fact that demand for talent is slowing down.

Here's why ghost jobs are on the rise.

Ghost jobs are actually not scams. They're from real companies, but they are openings that don't actually exist. That company is not actually hiring for that role at this moment in time.

They might be interested in hiring for that role in the future, or maybe they were hiring for it, but due to budget cuts, those roles were closed or put on hold.

A ghost job is a job that is not a real job. It's a job that is not a real job.

A ghost job is essentially a job that remains open online and never gets filled. The occurrence of ghost jobs has increased quite dramatically over the past five years. We're seeing a decline in the rate of hires to job postings, and that rate has basically halved over the past five years.

So whereas in 2019, we saw eight hires per 10 job postings, we are now seeing four hires per 10 job postings, which of course is quite a dramatic drop. This is a pretty worrying development because it just softens the signal of what a job posting really means, and whether there is truly a hiring intention behind that from the employer point of view.

I think we're seeing a lot of ghost jobs lately for the same reason that I think a lot of people keep their Tinder profiles up, even if they're not actively looking for a relationship. It's because we like to keep our options open for whether it's a good or a bad thing.

Companies are no different. Companies know that talent is not always available when they are ready to hire, so they want to be able to attract applications from potentially great candidates, even if they're not right now able to give that person a job.

Because of market visibility, if they are regularly listing their job openings, that will enhance a company's image, potentially showing them as a growing and thriving organization, and maybe that's a signal to investors or clients or competitors that their company is expanding the brand perception. Market research. Some companies, they have no idea what is a salary, what are the skill sets in demand, so they probably are posting to get that data. What are you expecting as a salary if you want to be in that role in this industry? So that's why they're collecting those data so that they can build a total compensation package and build the key performance indicator and net promoter scores for the companies if they really don't know how the recruiting works. So maybe it's for market insights to go into the future, but that does not benefit the job seekers at all.

That's such a bad employer branding.

The U.S. job market significantly slowed in July 2024. However, if you look at the overall labor market, it's still healthy. There's no question this report came in cooler than expected, but over the past three months, payrolls are up $170,000.

That's certainly a good enough clip to keep the labor market healthy.

According to June's Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, commonly known as JOLTS, the number of unemployed persons per job opening stands at 0.8, indicating a tight labor market.

Job openings and labor turnover known as JOLTS, JOLTS coming in near expectations, $8,184,000. Actually, that's better than expectations.

Despite a tight labor market on paper, many workers are still struggling to find jobs, indicating a disconnect between the data and the real-life experiences of job seekers.

The rise of ghost jobs is muddying the job support. It's making it harder for the Fed to make decisions and understand what the labor market looks like. Anecdotally, people will tell you that it's very tough out there. We've talked about this notion of unhireables, people who are out of work, got laid off and just can't find a job. They can't buy an interview. There are people coming out of college and they're finding that they're putting out 500, 800, 1,000 applications and they can't get an interview, let alone a job. And yet when you look at the base numbers on the job boards, it would seem like we're in an incredibly robust hiring market and that ghost jobs are creating a fake perception.

And no one knows how fake that perception is. And the Fed and economists are trying to understand what's real and what isn't. And they haven't yet figured out the silver bullet to understand. Over the past decade, JOLTS shows a marked increase in job openings for any given level of unemployment. And this is making people think, oh, well, maybe these openings are real openings. I would push back against that a little bit because JOLTS specifically asks employers to report only jobs that they could fill within the next 30 days. Most ghost jobs, that is jobs that employers don't intend to fill that soon or ever, either intentionally or by mistake. Most of those shouldn't appear in JOLTS at all. The Bureau of Labor Statistics stated that the JOLTS program doesn't use job listings for estimating job openings. While familiar with the term ghost jobs, the program believes it does not have any data related to the phenomenon.

It's really hard as a job seeker to spot a ghost job. There are some signs.

If you look at a job and you see that it's been open for over a month, sometimes it might say it's been open for many months. Some of the job boards will give an indication of how many people have applied for a job. And so if you see that a job has been open for 90 days and 10,000 people have applied, putting your application in your 10,001, your number, it's probably a ghost job.

So my firm uncovered that there's 1.7 million job openings on LinkedIn in 2023, as of the date of the article, that were older than a month. And these we've determined to be potential ghost jobs.

They're not necessarily ghost jobs. And that is the difficulty with ghost jobs is that they're hard to fully prove. So there are ghost jobs out there for sure. They're rising and they're a problem, but it's not always easy to completely pin them down. And companies don't want to admit that they're posting ghost jobs because it looks bad for them. It's anti-employee, it's anti-job seeker, and it's very pro-company. So they want to be careful about that. So they're not going to openly admit that they're posting ghost jobs. Another red flag for a job posting that's potentially a ghost job is when it's a vague job title. So for example, if they say we're looking for a video superstar, or we're looking for a project manager superstar, or they use some sort of identification that doesn't really say much, it could be an indication that they are just keeping a job opening available so they can attract talent and get a nice little pool of potential talent that they can pull from when and if they do need to hire.

Job boards are the most popular places for job seekers to find opportunities.

Indeed, ZipRecruiter and LinkedIn are among the most popular job boards in the U.S.

However, there's growing concern that some of these platforms aren't doing enough to address the issue of fake job postings. Job posting platforms can address ghost jobs. The first line of addressing them is taking full responsibility for them, even if they're not the ones posting it. That's totally understandable, but it's still their site.

It's their platform, and I believe they should take 100 percent responsibility.

They should be verifying, you know, they could implement an enhanced job post verification method. So potentially they're reaching out to multiple people in the hiring process, an HR person, a hiring manager, or verifying that person via social media.

I would love to see these job posting sites like LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, and Indeed, hold companies a little bit more accountable for being transparent about how long the listings have been up and how recently the position was hired for, if they're going to continue to keep the listing up. They should have options somewhere to say, we recently hired this position.

You can keep it up at that point. You can make it clear that, hey, if you think you're a good fit, go ahead and drop your application. Maybe if this doesn't work out, we'll reach back out to you.

CNBC reached out to a few major job posting platforms for comment.

LinkedIn stated that their job posting policy requires posts to be genuine and accurate, and they're removed after six months. Indeed noted that some postings stay active during ongoing searches or continuous hiring, and ZipRecruiter stated that ghost jobs are prohibited under their policies. At the end of the day, when it comes to ghost jobs,

I mean, companies got to do what they got to do. And I think they're willing to take that reputational risk if it means they can attract the best talent and do what's best for them at the end of the day. What ghost jobs speak about the labor market is that it's not currently friendly to job seekers, and companies are taking advantage of the labor market.

They're finding this opening that's this legal gray area, and they're taking advantage of it.

And they don't need to be nice to job seekers because they think that they owe them nothing.

And they think that they'll be able to push the cost of their own employees down with this because there's a lot of sentiment online about it being impossible to find a job right now.

So why am I going to leave my job and try to find another job? So I think what this might lead to, though, is job seekers doing the same thing to companies like keeping the doors open for themselves and looking for jobs the entire time they're working and having many recruitment contacts because that's what companies are doing. They're always looking for the next step and they're worried about themselves. Then that's going to create that same sentiment with employees.

Right now, even JOLTS is giving us some confusing signals. The discussion about ghost jobs is one of the ways that the financial community is trying to understand these trends.

Unfortunately, we probably won't know whether these really are permanent or temporary changes in the prevalence of ghost jobs until after this cycle is over. And the more academic economists sit there and really parse the data out. But right now, what we have is a lot of hypotheses coming out of the people who are watching the data very closely. Ghost jobs is one interesting potential explanation for some of the more confusing patterns that we're seeing in the labor market.