Companies are increasingly posting positions they have no intention of filling - a practice known as ghost jobs. While the exact scale is hard to measure, anyone who’s job hunted recently has likely encountered these phantom postings.

Ghost jobs emerge from a perfect storm of corporate incentives. Companies want to maintain talent pipelines. Hiring managers need to show growth potential. Recruiters are measured on activity metrics.

The result? Job postings have morphed from genuine hiring tools into marketing channels.

Think of it like a restaurant that takes reservations but never intends to seat you. They just want to gauge interest and keep a waiting list. It might help their planning, but it fundamentally breaks trust with customers.

When job postings don’t reflect real hiring intent, we lose our ability to read market signals. It’s like trying to gauge housing demand by looking at listings - if half the houses aren’t actually for sale, the data becomes meaningless.

This distortion affects everyone. Job seekers can’t tell which opportunities are real. Companies can’t accurately gauge market rates. Industry analysts can’t track actual demand. The noise drowns out the signal.

Every ghost job posting adds to what I call the “trust tax” - the extra effort and emotional labor required to navigate a system you can’t fully trust. Job seekers must now treat every posting with skepticism, companies must work harder to prove their authenticity, and the whole process becomes more inefficient.

Markets tend to correct inefficiencies over time. The ghost job era will likely end one of two ways: either companies will voluntarily move toward more transparent practices, or new platforms and tools will emerge to force transparency.

The tech industry faces enough real challenges without adding artificial ones. Ghost jobs might seem like a clever short-term tactic, but they’re creating long-term damage to the hiring ecosystem.

It’s time for companies to exorcise these ghosts and return to honest hiring practices.