Unlisted reports 28% of job postings stale at 90+ days open
Analysis of 607,050 postings across 15 ATS platforms finds median age of 36 days, with hospitality roles staying open longest.
What to know
- 28% of 607,050 job postings tracked across 15 ATS platforms have been open over 90 days; median posting age is 36 days.
- Stale posting rates vary sharply by sector (hospitality 43.9%, healthcare 19.7%) and by ATS platform (Lever 48.2%, Workday 17.2%).
- Debate centers on whether long-open postings indicate continuous hiring needs or fake positions—with hiring managers defending evergreen roles while job seekers report widespread ghosting and fraud.
The dispute Whether stale postings reflect legitimate business needs (continuous hiring, role complexity, long pipelines) or constitute fraud and misrepresentation (fake jobs meant to inflate hiring appearance or game metrics). · positions read across 25 posts and comments
Long-open postings reflect legitimate continuous hiring and role complexity, not fraud or deception.
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“If we decide we're going to grow headcount by 10 senior software engineers, we don't copy and paste the same job listing 10 times. We leave it open and collect resumes through that.”
Aurornis · Hacker News ↗
Many postings are fake, used to game hiring metrics or kept up without intent to hire; companies should remove postings if they've filled the role.
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“It's clear-cut fraud - they are advertising something that doesn't exist, specifically to game numbers.”
legitster · Hacker News ↗
Job seekers are experiencing widespread non-response and ghosting; companies are inundated with applications and can afford to be extremely selective or negligent.
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“I was recently job searching and roughly 50% of all jobs ghosted me. Just an automated email and then... silence. And when applying via LinkedIn only ~5% of companies even opened my application.”
probably_wrong · Hacker News ↗
Long-open postings may signal high turnover, poor working conditions, or unrealistic salary/location expectations rather than fraud.
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“It's simply because they can't find people desperate enough with good qualifications to work for low wages in HCOL areas like northern VA and DC.”
Rotdhizon · Hacker News ↗
Unlisted Job posting tracking service
How it unfolded 1 development · click the chart to see its coverage articlespostscomments
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Report shows hospitality postings sit longest, healthcare turns over fastest
Hospitality sector has 43.9% of postings open over 90 days with median of 65 days. Healthcare sector shows fastest turnover at 19.7% over 90 days. Lever boards carry the largest stale share at 48.2%; Workday the smallest at 17.2%.
“If we decide we're going to grow headcount by 10 senior software engineers, we don't copy and paste the same job listing 10 times. We leave it open and collect resumes through that.”
— Aurornis, HN commenter, hiring manager · source -
> If we decide we're going to grow headcount by 10 senior software engineers, we don't copy and paste the same job listing 10 times. We leave it open and collect resumes through that. At a large or fast growing company, we might never stop interviewing and hiring senior software engineers. The listing stays open for a year or more.How on earth am…
2 more of the top 3 · 25 posts in this stretch
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I work with US healthcare postings and our numbers are pretty similar: >400k open/active postings, 30% over 90 days, median 44 days. These are direct-hire only postings from the employers (no job boards / aggregators / staffing agencies).I don't have a hypothesis for why jobs stay posted for so long, other than that employers are always look for a…
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A small anecdote from the cleared space (security clearance jobs). If you look through websites like clearedjobs, you'll notice that you see the same sets of cyber jobs posted over and over and over. All from the same companies in the same locations. Come to find, it's simply because they can't find people desperate enough with good qualifications…
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background
Unlisted releases Ghost Jobs Report tracking posting age across 607,050 positions — Analysis measured postings across 15 applicant tracking systems, directly from employer career sites. The report found 28% of postings open over 90 days, with median age of 36 days. Data gathered over 29 days from August 24 to September 23, 2026.
What people are saying 21 voices from 1 site · best of 25 · verbatim
- How can job seekers distinguish between genuinely open roles and postings that are dead or filled?
- Should companies be required to close postings once a role is filled, or specify multi-hire evergreen positions upfront?
- What percentage of stale postings are actually fake versus legitimately hard-to-fill roles?
- Yesterday
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What about companies in which managers hold on to requisitions to defer layoffs?Or companies that are in a perpetual hiring freeze?
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I have to say, as a middle-aged physician in the military, the dynamics of hiring terrify me. I interviewed to get into college, medical school, and residency. At all other times I have been gainfully employed. I hear about people studying for weeks or months for job interviews. What do you do to study?
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That seems like something you could pretty easily solve for by just specifying that it's for multiple hires, or that the post is evergreen.
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This is not done everywhere. I've never hired in the US, but worked for companies in Europe and JP, from <100 people companies to FAANG, and all of them opened dedicated listing for every position we had to fill.
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Applied to over 1,000 jobs on Linkedin last year. Gave up and started using other websites or channels.It took about 100 apps/interview last year. These ghost jobs wasted about 6 months of my life.I'd drop $10k+ on a solution to this problem.
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This has been a problem/norm for many jobs for many years now. If you haven't had to deal with it before now, consider yourself lucky.
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I was recently job searching and roughly 50% of all jobs ghosted me. Just an automated email and then... silence. And when applying via LinkedIn only ~5% of companies even opened my application.I can believe that your company has a good reason for keeping the job up, but I also know that some job ads are black holes were no one bothers to do the…
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Another confounder is the opposite. When I've been hiring I'd often open up different public recs for the same role to cast a broader net. Some people self identify with certain terms and may not realize they'd be a fit.So what would happen is I'd have say 10 real openings, I may have 5 different job postings, and all of them would stay open until…
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Sounds like there are too many white collar employees and not enough white collar jobs. The market can pick and choose, wait for the perfect candidate to pop up.
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I sent a few CVs recently trying to get a fully remote job and the experience has been miserable.From what I can tell the job posting have been opened for a while, companies are inundated with CVs thanks to them offering remote and form the screening feedback I had (when I was lucky to get any feedback) it was basically that they can be as picky…
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You also have to deal with delusional hiring managers. A few months ago I remember seeing a comment on here from someone who had kept job listings up for years while hiring because he couldn't find anyone with the "right experience". Clearly there was no actual imminent need to fill the role and he was just hoping that some superstar would stumble…
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I talked to a hiring manager friend at a big company you've definitely heard of. I was looking for a job so I sent him a link to one of his jobs and said "can I interview for this?"He said: Oh, I have 23 recs on the job site but none of them are open. They just keep them there to make us look like we're still hiring like crazy.
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As someone with a niche job and title (and comes pretty decorated), I would expect to hear back on my applications more often and yet I get nothing either. There are some prominent companies (cough Figma, Smartsheet, Stripe cough) who literally have had an open role for exactly my job for nearly 3+ years without filling it.Maybe I'm thinking a bit…
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Then you'd still only have a small number of roles up, not the thousands of positions the article is showing for some companies. They'd be hiring hundreds of thousands a year if they were constantly interviewing for all of them, and I don't believe O'Reilly Auto Parts is recruiting people as quickly as a nation at war.
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Every time I've hired someone at a big company, it's taken multiple months to get candidates through the pipeline, and it was not uncommon to have to go back to the candidate pool when someone would accept an offer and change their mind before starting. 90 days to fill a role would be considered relatively quick.
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I conduct interviews pretty often for various levels. Interviews seems so broken from both sides. Hard to find jobs that aren’t ghost jobs. Hard to find candidates that won’t cheat using AI and actually know their stuff. Just feels like AI has made hiring in tech even more inefficient which says a lot.
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So you should apply to old job postings? Consensus in LATAM seems to be, they just forgot to take them down and they already have someone or in Latin America if you repost the same opening over and over the consensus seems to be the company is toxic they have a turnover problem, maybe you should say outright you're looking for 10 people
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This statistic constantly confuses people who haven't done hiring.If we decide we're going to grow headcount by 10 senior software engineers, we don't copy and paste the same job listing 10 times. We leave it open and collect resumes through that. At a large or fast growing company, we might never stop interviewing and hiring senior software…
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At least in my country, a job posting that stays up forever isn't a ghost job. It's a company that can't keep people. Either the conditions are brutal or the pay is garbage.
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I was under the impression a large % of jobs posted on jobs sites are done simply for compliance reasons and because HR has some "bullshit jobs" parts to it and the companies will usually simply hire from within the company itself.
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There are some browser plugins you can use for job sites like LinkedIn to filter out Ghost Jobs. It's been somewhat helpful, but honestly it feels like 90% of tech jobs right now are Ghost jobs.It's happened so many times. Apply for a job, within an hour get an email that says I am not qualified (not true), and then a week later the same job gets…