Ghost jobs are job postings that companies keep online with no real intention of hiring for them in the near term. Common types include evergreen postings for high-turnover roles, pipeline-building postings that collect resumes for roles that may never open, compliance postings made for a pre-selected internal hire, and zombie requisitions that were approved then frozen but never taken down.

What percentage of job postings are ghost jobs?

A 2026 analysis found that 28% of job postings on company career sites have been open for more than 90 days. Surveys of recruiters have separately estimated that a meaningful share of advertised roles are kept up continuously regardless of whether there is an immediate opening. Exact numbers vary by study, but the long-open share is consistently large enough to distort anyone's search math.

How do ghost jobs affect layoff financial planning?

If a meaningful share of visible postings is not real near-term demand, your effective job pool is smaller than the job boards suggest, and your search will likely take longer than the published medians. The practical adjustment is to plan your financial runway for a longer search, commonly adding six to eight weeks of buffer beyond the median duration, and to treat severance and unemployment benefits as a buffer rather than a foundation.

How can I spot a ghost job posting?

Common red flags include a posting that has been live for more than 90 days, evergreen language such as 'we are always accepting applications', vague requirements, no salary range listed, the same role reposted every few weeks, and postings that reference future or projected openings. Roles with high natural turnover are the most likely to be evergreen.

Layoff planning September 26, 2026

Ghost Jobs: Why 28% of Job Postings Have Been Open for 90+ Days

A data point made the rounds recently and deserves more attention than it got: 28% of job postings on company career sites have been open for more than 90 days. Not aggregated from scrapers — postings on the companies' own sites.

Think about what that means. A posting open for three months is either a role nobody wants, a role nobody is allowed to fill, or a role that was never real in the first place. All three categories have a name now: ghost jobs. And if you are planning a layoff, a quit, or any career transition where your savings are the clock, ghost jobs quietly inflate every number you are counting on.

What a Ghost Job Actually Is

"Ghost job" is not one thing. It is at least four, and they fail you in different ways:

Evergreen reqs. Roles with chronic turnover — warehouse, retail, sales, support, nursing — stay posted permanently because applications are treated as inventory. The company is not hiring this month. It is stocking a freezer.
Pipeline collecting. The req is not approved yet, but HR keeps a posting live to harvest resumes, so that when the budget clears, the search starts with 400 candidates instead of zero. You will be contacted in six months, or never.
Compliance theater. The role has an internal hire or a visa requirement, but policy or law says it must be posted publicly. It sits there for 30 days like a legal notice in a newspaper.
Zombie reqs. The role was real. Then came the hiring freeze, the merger, the quarterly miss. Nobody told the careers page. The posting will outlive the team that created it.

The first two are usually intentional. The last two are just neglect. From your side of the screen, the difference does not matter — the application goes into the same void.

Why Companies Keep Them Up

Very little of this is sinister. Most of it is incentive math:

Taking down a posting costs effort; leaving it up costs nothing. Nobody's performance review depends on pruning the careers page.
A careers page full of openings signals growth — to investors, to candidates, to competitors. Whether the openings are real is a detail.
Resumes are an asset. A free, always-on resume database is better than a paid one.
Recruiters are measured on pipeline, not on honesty about timelines. Keeping the funnel full is the job.

None of the people involved are lying, exactly. The system just never asks the question your side assumes it asks: is someone actually being hired for this?

What It Does to Your Search Math

The published numbers already look bad. The median job search takes about 11 weeks; the average is closer to 26. Those figures describe the experience of people who mostly applied to real openings, or at least a realistic mix.

Ghost jobs mean your effective pool is smaller than the job boards suggest. If roughly a quarter of long-open postings are not near-term demand, then the 40 openings you filtered down to are maybe 30. Your conversion rate drops, your search stretches, and — this is the part that hurts — you will blame yourself for the difference.

You will read advice about resume keywords and interview technique while the actual problem is that a chunk of your applications never had anywhere to land. That is not a skills problem. It is an inventory problem.

The calibration error: People who get laid off tend to plan around the median search length, then experience something longer, then conclude they are failing. A meaningful share of that gap is ghost jobs. Plan for it up front and it stops feeling like personal failure.

The Runway Adjustment

Here is the whole framework in one line:

Months of runway = available cash ÷ true essential monthly spending.

Nothing about ghost jobs changes that formula. What it changes is the assumption behind the withdrawal period. If you are planning a voluntary quit and expect to search while unemployed, the practical adjustment looks like this:

Start from the median, then add a ghost-job tax. If the median search in your field is 11 weeks, plan 14–16. The 3–6 extra weeks are the expected value of applying into voids.
Treat severance and unemployment as buffer, not foundation. Severance policies vary widely and unemployment benefit weeks range dramatically by state — from single digits in some states to 26+ in others. Neither is promised until it is deposited.
Divide by essentials, not lifestyle. Rent, food, insurance, minimum debt payments. Not your current monthly spend with the subscriptions and the takeout. The number is always uglier with the real floor, and it needs to be, because it is the one that keeps you honest.
Recalculate when anything changes. A freelance gig, a roommate, a signed offer — every income change moves the date. So does the check engine light.

You can run this number in 30 seconds with the Risk Runway calculator — savings in, essentials in, and you get months, not vibes.

How to Spot a Ghost Before You Spend an Evening on It

You cannot eliminate ghost jobs from your search, but you can stop paying the full application price for them. Red flags:

Posted more than 90 days ago (check the date — most boards hide it, but Google's job listings show it)
Evergreen language: "we are always accepting applications", "future openings", "build your talent profile"
Requirements so vague they could describe three different jobs
No salary range, especially where ranges are legally required
The same role reposted every few weeks — a sign of pipeline collecting, not hiring

And the single highest-leverage countermove: referrals beat postings. A referred candidate skips the ghost-job lottery entirely because a human decided your resume is worth a human's time. An afternoon spent getting one warm introduction is routinely worth more than a weekend of cold applications.

The Part That Actually Matters

Ghost jobs are annoying, but the reason they deserve a spot in your layoff planning is simple: they bias you toward optimism at exactly the moment you need realism. A careers page full of openings whispers "the market is fine, three months is plenty." The 28% number whispers back: plan for longer.

Whether you were laid off last week or you are negotiating with yourself about quitting, the move is the same. Write down your true essential monthly spend. Divide your cash by it. Add the ghost-job tax. Then look at the date that number puts you at, and make your decisions against that calendar instead of the one your optimism drafted.