Why Employers Ghost You, and Why So Many Job Postings Aren't Real

You apply. Nothing happens. No rejection, no update, nothing.

And some of the jobs you're applying to were never going to be filled from outside in the first place.

Both are real, and both are more common than they should be. Employers ghost candidates most of the time now, not occasionally. And a real share of job listings, especially the ones that sit open for months, exist for reasons that have nothing to do with hiring you: building a resume pipeline for later, looking like a growing company to staff or investors, or, in one specific legal case, satisfying immigration paperwork for a job that's already been filled internally.

Here's what the data actually shows.

How often employers actually ghost you

61% of candidates say they were ghosted after an interview, according to Greenhouse's 2024 State of Job Hunting report, a survey of 2,500 workers across the US, UK, and Germany. That's up 9 points from earlier the same year. Widen the question to "ghosted at any point in a job search" and iHire's October 2025 survey of 1,024 job seekers puts it at 53%.

Ask hiring managers instead of candidates and it gets worse. In a Resume Genius survey of 625 hiring managers, 80% admitted to ghosting a candidate at some point: 11% said always, 22% frequently, 47% occasionally. Only one in five said never.

These are single-company surveys, run by an applicant-tracking vendor, a job board, and a resume-writing service, not random-sample academic studies, and they ask slightly different questions, so they shouldn't be averaged into one number. But three separate surveys landing in the same broad range, plus a fourth signal, Revelio Labs' analysis of Glassdoor-style interview reviews found mentions of employer ghosting rose 120% between 2018 and 2023, point the same direction: ghosting is now closer to the norm than the exception.

Why companies publish jobs they don't intend to fill

This is the part that actually answers "why would a company post a job just to look good." The reasons converge across two independent sources: the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan U.S. federal research office, and reporting based on recruiters and hiring managers.

• Building a pipeline. Keep a generic listing live to collect resumes for a role that might open in a few months, without committing to interview anyone now.
• Signaling growth. A visible "we're hiring" page is free, public proof of momentum: to staff worried about layoffs, to investors during a fundraise, or to the market during a freeze the company hasn't announced. This is the traction reason, directly.
• Manufacturing optics. Post a role publicly to show a broad, diverse applicant pool while an internal candidate, or a specific referral, is already effectively chosen.
• Budget limbo. A position got approved, then the budget for it got frozen or cut, and nobody took the listing down.
• Hitting an internal quota. Some HR teams are measured on number of open reqs, independent of whether they're real, so postings stay live to hit a number.
• Testing the market. Post a role at a given salary to see how many, and how qualified, applicants show up, with no near-term plan to hire.
• Fishing. Leave the door open for an exceptional, unsolicited candidate, even with no active plan to fill the seat otherwise.

None of these require anyone to lie to you specifically. That's what makes a listing like this hard to spot from outside: there's no reliable tell that separates "we'll get to this eventually" from "we will never get to this."

How many listings are actually like this

Harder to pin down than the reasons behind it. There's no official government count of "fake" job postings. The closest official measure, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, is built to exclude them by definition: an "opening" only counts if it's a real, specific position, someone could start within 30 days, and the employer is actively recruiting outside the company for it (assuming employers answer honestly). That's according to the Congressional Research Service, in an April 2025 brief, which also notes that vendor-survey estimates on this topic, the kind you'll see quoted as "X% of postings are fake", can't be independently checked, because none of them publish consistent methodology.

The most careful attempt we found at an actual number comes from a single, not-yet-peer-reviewed 2024 working paper: researchers trained a text-classification model on 269,347 Glassdoor interview reviews, covering 1,199 companies across 97 industries, using candidates' own accounts of what happened after they applied. Their estimate: up to 21% of postings may run without genuine intent to hire from outside.

The one case where it's required by law

There's a version of this that isn't a gray-area business tactic. It's the law.

To sponsor a foreign worker, most often someone already on staff on an H-1B, for a green card, U.S. employers go through PERM labor certification. Federal regulation (20 CFR 656.17) requires a specific set of recruitment steps: two Sunday newspaper ads, a 30-day job order with the state workforce agency, and, for professional roles, additional recruitment on top of that. The purpose is to prove no qualified U.S. worker wants the job.

In the common case, the employer has already decided who's getting it: the person already doing it. There's no exception in the regulation for "we already know the outcome." Immigration lawyers advise running the process exactly as if the outcome weren't decided, because on paper, until certification, it technically isn't. As ProPublica reported, quoting a former Chamber of Commerce immigration lobbyist: "Even if you are trying to sponsor someone already on the job, you have to act as if you aren't."

The Department of Labor knows this happens. Its "good faith recruitment" doctrine and an anti-tailoring rule, an employer can't write requirements narrowly enough to specifically exclude qualified applicants, exist to police it. In practice, PERM denial rates stay low (around 8.5% in one recent quarter), which suggests enforcement isn't catching much of it. If you've ever applied to a role that felt oddly specific, went silent immediately, and was never filled by anyone external, this is one plausible, legally sanctioned reason why.

What to actually do with this

None of this makes the hunt less frustrating. It should make it easier to stop reading silence as a verdict on you specifically.

A few things worth doing differently:

• Notice how long a listing has been up. A posting that's been live for 90+ days with no changes is more likely to be a pipeline-builder or a stale req than an active search. Most boards don't show the original post date, only "reposted" or refreshed timestamps, which makes this harder to check than it should be.
• Ask about timeline directly, in the first real conversation you get. "When are you hoping to have someone in the role?" is a normal question. A vague or evasive answer is itself information.
• Don't take silence as a signal about your candidacy. At an 80% self-admitted ghosting rate among hiring managers, getting no response is closer to the median outcome of applying than a judgment on your resume.

Nobody outside a company can tell you which specific listing is a pipeline-builder and which is a live search. What we track on Remotera is how long a posting has sat untouched: listings past a configured age window get marked archived and sorted to the bottom of the feed instead of competing with roles that just went up. It's a blunt signal, old doesn't always mean fake and fake doesn't always mean old, but it's one honest thing to do with the data instead of guessing.