You have applied to adverts that went nowhere, and somewhere in the silence the thought arrives that some of those jobs were never real. It is a reasonable thought. As usually posed it is also unanswerable, because nobody can see an employer's intentions from a job board.
There is a sharper version of the question, though, and that one can be answered. What is a job advert actually evidence of?
The thing everyone is arguing about already has a definition
Since 2008 there has been a legal definition of a job vacancy in force across the European Union. It was not written to police adverts. It exists so that Member States count the same thing when they report vacancies to Eurostat every quarter, and it is worth reading anyway, because it takes the question apart in exactly the place it needs taking apart.
Regulation (EC) No 453/2008 defines a job vacancy as "a paid post that is newly created, unoccupied, or about to become vacant" which meets two conditions: "(a) for which the employer is taking active steps and is prepared to take further steps to find a suitable candidate from outside the enterprise concerned; and (b) which the employer intends to fill either immediately or within a specific period of time".1
Two limbs, joined by "and". Recruiting, and intending to fill. A post that fails either one is not a vacancy for counting purposes, and the drafters were careful enough to separate them, which tells you they can come apart in practice.
That text has a shelf life worth knowing about. Regulation (EU) 2025/941, which has applied since 1 January 2026, repeals the 2008 regulation "with effect from 1 January 2027" and provides that "References to the repealed Regulations shall be construed as references to this Regulation".8 So the definition below is the one in force as this is written, and it has about four months left. The successor does not carry a definition of a job vacancy among its own definitions, which leaves the two-limb test to the implementing acts made under it rather than to the face of the regulation.
The advert is one of the active steps
The regulation left both concepts to be defined later. Commission Regulation (EC) No 19/2009 did it, and the list is short enough to quote whole. "Active steps to find a suitable candidate" shall include: "notifying the job vacancy to the public employment services"; "contacting a private employment agency/head hunters"; "advertising the vacancy in the media (for example internet, newspapers, magazines)"; "advertising the vacancy on a public notice board"; "approaching, interviewing or selecting possible candidates/potential recruits directly"; "approaching employees and/or personal contacts"; "using internships".2
The third item is the thing you are looking at. Publishing an advert on the internet is an active step by definition, so the advert is proof of one enumerated active step and nothing beyond it. It is not proof of the rest of limb (a), which also requires the employer to be "prepared to take further steps" and to be looking for a candidate "from outside the enterprise concerned".1 An employer collecting CVs for later, or running the advert while a colleague is lined up for the job, may fail limb (a) as well. And publishing an advert proves nothing whatever about limb (b), because an act of advertising cannot demonstrate an intention. Particular fields inside an advert can bear on intent, and one of them is worth hunting for further down. The existence of the advert is not one of them.
That is the asymmetry, and it explains why the argument about ghost jobs never resolves. One side points at the advert and says an employer went out and recruited. The other side points at the silence and says nobody is being hired. Both can be right at once, because the advert is the one fragment of the definition printed on the page, and it is neither all of the first condition nor any of the second. It does not even establish that the recruiting is still going on, as the third-party copies below make clear.
The same regulation adds one more thing worth knowing. The "specific period of time" in limb (b) "shall refer to the maximum time the vacancy is open and intended to be filled. That period shall be unlimited; all vacancies for which active steps are continuing on the reference date shall be reported."2 Even the statistical definition puts no clock on a vacancy. An advert running for months is not, by itself, outside the definition of a genuine opening.
Four different things get called a ghost job
Lumping them together is what makes the phenomenon feel like a conspiracy. Separated, each one has a mechanism, and only some of them involve anybody deceiving you.
The requisition that is meant to stay open
The National Association of State Workforce Agencies has a name for this, and a written policy disagreement about it. "Evergreen jobs are broadly defined as positions that are always open, either due to high turnover, high demand, or specific skills required." Employers "list evergreen jobs continuously to collect pools of resumes so that HR departments are ready to interview, hire, and quickly place candidates for their internal business customers".4
This is a real practice with a real purpose, and state workforce agencies disagree sharply about whether to carry it. In a 2018 survey with 45 state responses, 22 treated evergreen jobs like any other job, 10 had no policy, and 13 "do not allow evergreen jobs because they require job orders to be linked to currently open positions with a closing date".4 That last clause is the interesting one. The field those thirteen made compulsory is the closing date, which is the one place in an ordinary advert where an intention to fill leaves any visible trace.
The state members of the same steering committee recorded the cost of the practice in their own words: the main disadvantage is "the confusion they can create for job seekers".4
The copy that outlived the original
The Congressional Research Service, briefing US legislators on the subject in April 2025, lists this among the reasons postings appear that nobody intended. "Ghost jobs can result from actions taken by third parties, such as online job boards automatically copying postings from other websites. If an employer hires someone for a position, the employer may remove the posting from the website where it was originally posted, not realizing it was copied elsewhere."3
Nobody lied to you. The advert was true when it was published, it was copied, the original came down, and the copy is still sitting on a page you can find. What becomes of an application sent through one of those copies is not something the briefing says, and not something worth assuming either way.
The advert a rule requires
Some adverts run because an employer is legally required to run them, on a schedule set by somebody else.
In Ireland, an employer applying for certain employment permits for a non-EEA worker must first complete a Labour Market Needs Test. A notice "must be placed with the Department of Social Protection Employment Services/EURES employment network for a minimum of 28 days", and "must be placed on an additional online platform, also for a minimum of 28 continuous days". Both must state a description of the employment, the name of the employer, the minimum annual remuneration, the locations and the hours. And "vacancies should not be amended or extended, at any time, during the 28 days of advertising".6
The post is real and the job exists, and the advert's 28 days are set by a rule rather than by the hiring. How often an employer running one already has somebody in mind is not something the page records, and not something this article is going to guess at. From outside, an advert serving out its statutory window looks like any other advert, and there is no pretending you can spot one, because you cannot.
The opening that stopped being one
The CRS list covers this too, in one flat sentence: "Changed circumstances may alter employers' intent to hire."3 Budgets get frozen between the requisition being approved and you finding it. It also covers the less innocent version, employers posting to "demonstrate they have recruited a diverse pool of applicants, even though they plan to hire an internal candidate", and the growth-signalling one, posting to "suggest they are growing".3
What the numbers in circulation can and cannot support
You have probably seen a percentage. Treat all of them carefully.
The CRS position is blunt: "There are no official statistics on the magnitude of ghost jobs."3 On the industry figures that fill the gap, its assessment is worth quoting in full, because it applies to nearly every number you will meet on this subject. "The firms behind these studies market hiring-related services, including job posting verification tools. They have released varying levels of information regarding the methodologies of the surveys and analyses, making it difficult to assess the quality of ghost job prevalence estimates based on these data."3
One academic attempt is in circulation: a preprint posted to arXiv in October 2024 by Hunter Ng, which applies a language model to Glassdoor data and reports, in the author's own hedged phrasing, that "up to 21% of job ads may be ghost jobs".5 Up to, and may be. Its arXiv listing carries no journal reference and no version after the original submission, so there is nothing on it showing the work has been through peer review. It is a serious attempt at a hard measurement problem rather than a fact to carry around.
For contrast, look at what an official vacancy count demands. As the CRS describes the US Bureau of Labor Statistics' Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, it counts a job opening only where a specific position exists with work available for it, the job could start within 30 days, and the employer is actively recruiting outside workers, which is why the briefing judges that honestly reported JOLTS openings are unlikely to be ghost jobs, while noting that "There may be ambiguity, however, in the intensity of 'active recruiting'".3 Official statistics get to ask the employer directly and confidentially. You get the advert.
That gap is also why, in the United States, little is being done about it. Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act prohibits "unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce", and CRS explains why extending it here would be hard: "An employer's intent to hire for a given position is not easily discoverable and may be subjective, making proof of deception difficult." As of that briefing in April 2025, no bill explicitly addressing ghost job postings had been introduced in Congress.3
One jurisdiction has gone the other way and forced the nearest available fact onto the page. Since 1 January 2026, an Ontario employer with 25 or more employees advertising publicly "must include a statement on whether the posting is for an existing vacancy or not", and an existing vacancy is defined as "a position that is imminently available for a qualified candidate to fill". The province's own guidance then draws the same line this article has been drawing, in a one-line note: "this requirement does not create an obligation for an employer to fill the vacancy."7
So this is not limb (b) either. What Ontario compels is a statement of vacancy status, that a post is imminently available, which sits nearer the first condition than the second; an intention to fill is still nobody's to demand. It is the closest any evidence here comes to the question, and the only case where the answer is handed to the applicant rather than inferred.
Two more Ontario duties are worth knowing if you apply there. An employer that uses artificial intelligence "to screen, assess or select applicants" must say so in the posting, and an employer that interviews you must tell you whether a hiring decision has been made, within 45 days of your last interview.7
What you can check
Each of these is worth doing, and each has a limit.
Find the advert at its source. Look for the same role on the employer's own careers site rather than on the board that showed it to you. If it is there and current, you have removed one of the four explanations above, since a copy that outlived its original is a mechanism CRS describes.3 If it is not there, that is not evidence of anything much: plenty of employers, especially small ones, recruit only through boards and agencies and never post to a careers page at all, and CRS gives no figures on how often stale copies occur.
Look for a closing date. Thirteen American state job banks made a closing date the price of being listed, on the reasoning that a job order should be tied to a currently open position.4 An advert carrying one has committed to something. The limit is that most private adverts in most markets never carry a closing date, and its absence is ordinary rather than damning.
Note the date, and recognise a re-post. Among the 22 states that carry evergreen jobs like any other, 20 put a time limit on jobs entered by their own staff or by employers, running from 30 days to a year and most often 90 days, after which "a new job order must be created"; 14 of the 22 do not apply that limit to the shared NLx feed at all.4 A freshly dated advert can be an expired requisition renewed rather than a new opening, so keeping a record of what you have already applied to is worth more than it sounds.
Ask. If a recruiter contacts you, ask whether there is an approved requisition, a hiring manager and a target start date, or whether they are building a pipeline. Both are legitimate answers and the second one tells you how to spend your time. The limit is that not everyone will answer, and asking a hiring manager the same thing in a first interview reads differently than asking a recruiter on a screening call.
If you are applying in Ontario, read the posting for the vacancy statement. It is the one place in this article's evidence where an employer has to tell you on the page whether the post is actually open.7 The limits are real, and there are more of them than the headcount. The duty does not reach employers with fewer than 25 employees, nor the Crown and its agencies. It also does not reach several kinds of posting at all, because a publicly advertised job posting excludes "a general recruitment campaign that does not advertise a specific position", a posting restricted to existing employees, and a posting for work performed outside Ontario.7 That first exclusion is worth sitting with: the advert that says only "we are always looking for talent" is the pipeline posting this article opened with, and it is the one the rule does not touch. And a posting that declares an existing vacancy still carries no obligation to fill it.
What none of this gives you is limb (b). You cannot read intent off a page, which is precisely the problem the FTC would have in court. So the sane response is not detection, it is allocation: spend your best work on the applications where you can see a specific opening, a named team or a person who has spoken to you, and treat the rest as cheap lottery tickets rather than as investments that failed.
If the searching itself is the expensive part, JobCraftly will do that reading for you and say why each role it puts in front of you fits. It is working from the same adverts you are, so it can tell you whether a post suits you. It cannot tell you whether anyone will be hired, and neither can anything else.
What this does not settle
Almost everything above is drawn from four jurisdictions. The vacancy definition is European statistical law and applies to how Member States count, not to what an employer may advertise. The Labour Market Needs Test is Irish employment-permit law and binds Irish employers seeking a permit, nobody else. The evergreen policy survey covers American state workforce agencies in 2018. The CRS briefing describes US law and US data, and the FTC has no authority over a Danish or German advert. The disclosure duty is Ontario law and binds nobody outside Ontario, which is exactly why it is worth knowing that a legislature looked at this problem and decided the fix was to make employers say it.
None of it is a prevalence estimate, and this article has deliberately not given you one, because the only honest summary of the evidence is that nobody has measured this well. What is settled is narrower and more useful. A job advert is, by the definition in force since 2008, an act of recruitment. Whether anyone intends to fill the post is a separate fact, held somewhere you cannot see, and it was never printed on the page you have been reading so carefully.
