The internet is obsessed with ghost jobs. "50% of listings are fake." "Companies post jobs they never intend to fill." It makes for great rage content.
But after scoring 38,806 listings pulled directly from corporate hiring systems, we think the ghost job debate is a distraction from the actual problem.
Most job listings aren't fake. They're just bad. And bad listings waste more of your time than fake ones ever could — because you can't tell the difference until you're three interviews deep.
The Real Numbers
This is a July 2026 snapshot of our scored corpus. We pull listings directly from corporate applicant tracking systems — Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever, SmartRecruiters, Workday, and 17 others. Not from Indeed. Not from LinkedIn. From the company's own hiring system.
Every listing gets scored on freshness, description quality, salary transparency, employer signals, and role substance. Here's what 38,806 listings across 3,128 companies look like:
| Grade | What it means | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | Excellent — clear, fresh, transparent | 80 | 0.2% |
| B | Good — solid listing, minor gaps | 20,067 | 51.7% |
| C | Ambiguous — missing key signals | 15,302 | 39.4% |
| D–F | Low quality — likely not worth applying | 3,357 | 8.7% |
Only 0.2% of listings are excellent. Half are good enough. And nearly 48.1% are either ambiguous or worse.
The 6% that are genuinely low quality? Those are the "ghost jobs" everyone is angry about. But they're the minority of the problem.
The Real Problem: 15,302 Listings You Can't Read
The C-grade bucket — 39.4% of all listings — is where careers go to die quietly.
These aren't fake jobs. The company probably does want to hire someone. But the listing gives you almost nothing to work with:
- No salary. Is this a $90K role or a $180K role? You'll find out after two weeks of interviewing.
- Vague description. "Fast-paced environment, wear many hats, passionate self-starter." What does this person actually do all day?
- Stale date. Posted 3 months ago, still live. Is the hiring manager actively reviewing resumes, or did they forget to close the req?
- No department, no team, no hiring manager. You're applying into a void.
None of these are "ghost jobs." All of them waste your time. The question isn't "is this job real?" It's "is this job worth my time?" That's a harder question, and it requires more data than "real or fake."
What Separates Good Listings From Bad Ones
Salary transparency is the #1 signal
| Jobs | Avg Quality Score | |
|---|---|---|
| Salary posted | 12,970 | 0.677 |
| No salary | 25,839 | 0.598 |
Listings with salary information score 24.5% better across every quality dimension. Only 33% of listings include any salary data — two-thirds of the market is opaque by default.
40% of listings are stale
Of the 30,980 listings with posted dates, 12,497 (40.3%) have been live for over 60 days without being updated.
Remote jobs are higher quality
| Jobs | Avg Quality Score | |
|---|---|---|
| Remote | 3,940 | 0.678 |
| Non-remote | 34,869 | 0.619 |
Remote listings score 15.5% higher than non-remote ones — when you compete for talent nationally, you can't rely on proximity, so you have to sell the role on paper.
Bigger companies post better listings
| Company size | Companies | Jobs | Avg Quality Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| 50+ open roles | 211 | 16,366 | 0.651 |
| 10–49 roles | 747 | 15,931 | 0.621 |
| < 10 roles | 2,170 | 6,512 | 0.568 |
Companies with 50+ open positions post 19% better listings than those with fewer than 10.
Why "Ghost Job Detector" Is the Wrong Product
The ghost job framing asks a binary question: real or fake? But the data shows that's not the useful question. Only 6% of listings are clearly fake. The other 94% exist on a spectrum from excellent to opaque. What actually matters is the signal density of a listing — how much information it gives you to make a decision.
What To Do With This
If you're a job seeker: stop asking "is this job real?" Start asking "does this listing tell me enough to decide?" Look for salary, check the posted date, read the description with skepticism.
If you're a recruiter: the 39% ambiguous bucket is where you lose commission time — a role that looks real but takes 6 months to close is worse than a ghost job, because you invested before you found out.
If you're an employer: two-thirds of your postings don't include salary, and 40% haven't been refreshed in two months. You're not posting ghost jobs — you're posting lazy ones.
How the screening works
Every listing gets one of four states below. Like everything else on this page, these are automated estimates, not verdicts — see our terms for how we frame ghost-job and risk signals.
- No ghost signals — no ghost-risk signals, the posting looks active.
- Worth verifying — some signals suggest a quick sanity-check before you apply.
- Possible ghost job — signals flag this posting as a possible ghost job: it may be stale, evergreen, or not actively hiring, worth verifying before you invest time.
- No badge shown yet — not enough signal gathered.
This page is a static July 2026 snapshot. For live, market-wide numbers, see market trends.
Data: the Subspace jobs corpus.