About 19% of jobs advertised on digital job boards in the second quarter showed no meaningful hiring activity after receiving at least one application, according to hiring platform Greenhouse.
Lawmakers in New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas are now pushing legislation to force employers to clean up their listings.
The term ghost job describes a posting that receives applications but leads to no interviews, tests, or hiring decisions.
Companies leave them up for a range of reasons, including building a candidate pipeline, waiting on budget approval, or hoping a standout applicant materializes. Job seekers cannot tell the difference, and they are losing time and money as a result.
Heather Sanford, a marketing professional in the Austin, Texas, area, has applied for more than 3,000 jobs since her contract role ended in May 2025. She has burned through nearly $40K in savings and is moving in with her father to manage costs.
"If you've posted a job and you have 500 applicants, are you telling me not one or two or three are qualified?"
Heather Sanford, job seeker
The frustration is not limited to experienced workers. A June report from Resume Builder found that 34% of recent college grads had a job offer rescinded after accepting it, and 68% were ghosted by employers after interviewing.
Among those same graduates, 55% lowered their salary expectations and 65% believed AI contributed to cuts in entry-level roles.
The legislative push
New York's bill has already passed both houses of the state legislature. It requires employers to disclose when they expect a role to be filled and imposes fines for violations. Governor Kathy Hochul is expected to review it when it reaches her desk.
Pennsylvania's version, proposed by Representative Jim Prokopiak, would require employers to list accurate hiring intentions and establish timelines to remove posts. It is currently in the state House's Labor and Industry Committee.
In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton opened an investigation into LinkedIn, arguing the platform may be misleading paying customers by listing jobs that do not represent genuine hiring opportunities.
LinkedIn says its policies require posts to be authentic and that it displays response times and candidate review status to help applicants assess listings.
Ghost jobs do not show up in official government data because employers are only supposed to report openings that could start within 30 days and are actively recruiting.
The Labor Department counted 7.4M job openings in June, but that figure does not capture listings that stall silently.
AI is adding another layer of opacity to the process. A class-action lawsuit filed in California argues that automated screening software from Eightfold AI scores and ranks applicants on a 0-to-5 scale without disclosing this to candidates.
Researchers warn that these systems can entrench biases and effectively algorithmically blackball a candidate across multiple employers using the same underlying tools.
For job seekers, the combined effect of ghost listings, AI screening, and employer ghosting is a market where effort and outcome have become largely disconnected.