Phantom Openings: Ghost Job Postings, the New Disclosure Laws, and How Leaders Can Restore Honesty to Hiring
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Abstract: Ghost job postings, meaning advertisements for roles an employer does not intend to fill soon or at all, have moved from a job-seeker complaint to a regulatory and reputational issue. This article reviews survey, platform, and labor-market evidence on how common ghost postings are. It considers why organizations publish them and what they cost candidates, current employees, employer brands, and the quality of public labor-market data. It also examines the closely related practice of employers ghosting candidates. Drawing on research on applicant reactions, organizational justice, signaling theory, realistic job previews, and psychological contracts, the article explains why misleading postings damage trust well beyond any single hiring process. It then maps the emerging disclosure regime, including Ontario's 2026 job posting rules, New York's pending Senate Bill S8877, proposals in other states, and a Texas consumer-protection probe of LinkedIn. The article sets out five evidence-based responses, with organizational examples, and three pillars for building long-term hiring integrity.
Consider a scenario that many talent leaders will recognize, even if the details differ. A vice president asks HR to keep a senior analyst role "live" on the careers site and several job boards. There is no approved headcount and no plan to interview anyone before the next fiscal year. The reasoning is familiar. The posting costs nothing, it keeps a pipeline warm, and it shows the market (and an overloaded team) that the function is growing. What nobody asks is who will answer the hundreds of people who apply in the meantime, or what those people will conclude when they hear nothing.
That scenario captures the problem this article addresses. A ghost job is a posting for a role the employer does not genuinely intend to fill, does not intend to fill in any reasonable timeframe, or has already filled and simply failed to take down. On their own, few of these decisions look sinister. Taken together they now shape how millions of people experience the labor market. In a ResumeBuilder.com survey of 1,011 U.S. adults who had looked for work in the previous two years, 86% said they had encountered a suspected ghost job, and 58% said they had interviewed for a role they later suspected was one (Haller, 2026). WorldatWork highlighted those findings for its members in mid-October 2026 (WorldatWork, 2026). The same survey found that a third of respondents now trust employers less because of the experience.
The policy environment has shifted too. Ontario began requiring larger employers to state whether a public job posting is for an existing vacancy on January 1, 2026, and to tell interviewed applicants within 45 days whether a hiring decision has been made (Government of Ontario, 2026). In June 2026 the New York legislature passed a bill that would require employers with 100 or more employees to state when they expect to fill an advertised job, or to say plainly that they are only collecting résumés (Maurer, 2026; New York State Senate, 2026). Pennsylvania, New Jersey, California, and Kentucky have similar proposals in play. Texas's attorney general has opened a consumer-protection investigation into whether LinkedIn profited from ghost listings (Office of the Texas Attorney General, 2026). A U.S. senator has asked the Bureau of Labor Statistics whether ghost postings distort the job openings data the Federal Reserve watches (Gallego, 2026).
For leaders, then, ghost jobs are no longer just a candidate-experience annoyance. They touch employer brand, the credibility of the recruiting function, the morale of existing employees, data that policymakers rely on, and a fast-growing body of legal risk. This article reviews what we know, what we do not know, and what organizations can do to keep their job postings truthful. My central argument is simple. A job posting is a public promise. When organizations treat it as a marketing asset with no obligation behind it, they spend trust that is hard to earn back.
The Ghost Job Landscape
Defining Ghost Jobs and Employer Ghosting
Definitions matter here, because much of the confusion in public debate comes from lumping different practices together. I find it useful to separate four situations that all produce postings that do not lead to a hire.
The first is the deliberate ghost posting: an advertisement for a role with no approved headcount or no intention to hire, published for some other purpose. The second is the pipeline or evergreen posting, used to collect applications continuously for roles that open often, such as part-time lecturers, nurses, or retail associates. These can be entirely legitimate when they are labeled as such. The University of Louisville, for example, describes an evergreen requisition in its Workday system as a tool for seasonal, high-volume, or hard-to-fill roles. When a preferred candidate emerges, that candidate is moved to a regular requisition (University of Louisville, n.d.). The third is the zombie posting: a real job that was filled, cancelled, or frozen, but whose advertisement remains live because nobody took it down or because a job board scraped and republished it. The fourth is the fraudulent posting created by scammers. That is a separate problem with its own remedies, and I set it aside in this article.
The legal proposals now in circulation focus mainly on the first three. New York's bill, for instance, does not ban pipeline postings. It requires employers to disclose them as such (Lavin & DiMichele, 2026). Ontario likewise requires a posting to state whether it is for an existing vacancy, which leaves room for talent-pool recruiting as long as it is honest (Law & Gould, 2025).
Employer ghosting is a related but distinct behavior. It refers to an employer cutting off communication with a candidate mid-process, often after one or more interviews, without telling the candidate the outcome. The two practices reinforce each other. A candidate who is interviewed for a role that was never going to be filled will almost inevitably be ghosted, because there is no decision to communicate. In the 2026 ResumeBuilder survey, about a third of respondents named employer behavior such as no response or an abruptly stopped interview process as a sign they were dealing with a ghost job (Haller, 2026).
Prevalence, Drivers, and Distribution
How common are ghost jobs? The honest answer is that estimates vary widely because they measure different things.
The most direct evidence comes from applicant tracking data. Greenhouse, which provides hiring software to thousands of employers, reported that 18.9% of jobs posted on its platform in the second quarter of 2024 were ghost jobs. It also reported that 70% of employers had listed at least one (King, 2024). In its 2024 State of Job Hunting report, based on a survey of 2,500 workers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, Greenhouse put the quarterly range at 18% to 22% of postings (Greenhouse, 2024). An academic working paper reached a similar order of magnitude by applying a language-model classification method to Glassdoor data. It estimated that up to 21% of job ads may be ghost jobs and found the practice more common in specialized industries and larger firms (Ng, 2024).
A second family of estimates compares job openings with hires. Revelio Labs matched postings to new hires who started within six months in the same company, role, seniority, and state. It found that the number of hires per posting fell from about 0.75 in 2018 to below 0.5 in 2023 (Hao & Simon, 2023). Other analysts have used the federal Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), in which the Bureau of Labor Statistics asks employers how many positions they are actively recruiting for. MyPerfectResume's analysis of JOLTS data found about 7.6 million openings against 5.1 million hires in April 2026, a gap of roughly one-third. It also found that the gap has stayed far above its pre-2020 level (Escalera, 2026; O'Bannon, 2025). The most recent JOLTS release reported 7.1 million openings and 5.2 million hires in August 2026 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2026).
These openings-to-hires comparisons are suggestive, but they cannot count ghost jobs. Some openings are filled the following month. Some hires come from people who never saw a posting. Some roles, particularly in government, health care, and education, take a long time to fill for structural reasons. Even MyPerfectResume's own career expert cautioned that employers are not always acting maliciously (McKinsey, 2025). I treat the JOLTS gap as context for the debate, not as a measurement.
The third source is employers themselves. In a 2024 ResumeBuilder.com survey that screened 1,641 hiring managers, 40% said their company had posted a listing for a job it did not intend to fill in the past year. About three in ten said their company had one live at the time (ResumeBuilder.com, 2024). An earlier Clarify Capital survey of 1,000 hiring managers found that 27% admitted to leaving postings up for more than four months (Berger, 2023). Self-reports of this kind come from vendor surveys with limited methodological disclosure. Still, they matter because they reveal motive, and the motives are revealing.
Among the managers in the 2024 ResumeBuilder survey whose companies had posted fake listings, the most common reasons were to appear open to external talent (67%), to appear to be growing (66%), to make employees believe help was coming (63%), and to make employees feel replaceable (62%). Another 59% wanted to collect résumés for future use (ResumeBuilder.com, 2024). Seven in ten of those managers said the practice was morally acceptable. These figures should be treated cautiously, but they point to three broad drivers.
The first driver is signaling. Postings are cheap, public, and widely read, by investors, competitors, and a firm's own employees as well as by job seekers. Organizations use them to project growth or stability. The second is option value. In uncertain conditions, a posting keeps a pool of candidates warm in case budget is approved or a key person resigns. The third is internal leverage. Some managers use the appearance of external hiring to placate overworked teams or to temper pay and promotion demands. Senator Ruben Gallego's June 2026 letters to the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Labor asked directly whether employers use postings this way (Gallego, 2026). Alongside these deliberate drivers sits plain administrative drift. Postings are syndicated to many boards, nobody owns the takedown, and applicant tracking systems republish expired jobs (McKinsey, 2025).
Distribution is uneven. Press coverage of Greenhouse's analysis reported that ghost postings reached as high as one in three listings in some industries, with construction, art, and legal roles at the top of the list (Williams, 2025). Those figures come from secondary reporting rather than a published methodology, so they are best read as directional. The Revelio Labs analysis found sharp declines in hires per posting in administration and support, construction, management, and finance (Hao & Simon, 2023). Ng (2024) found ghost postings more prevalent among larger firms. The experience is uneven for candidates as well. Greenhouse (2024) found that 66% of candidates from historically underrepresented groups reported being ghosted after an interview, compared with 59% of white candidates.
Organizational and Individual Consequences
Organizational Performance Impacts
It is tempting to see ghost postings as low-cost and low-risk. The evidence suggests the costs are real but diffuse, which is precisely why they tend to be underpriced.
Employer brand and attraction. Recruitment research has long held that candidates read organizational behavior during hiring as a signal of what employment there will be like. Rynes (1991) argued that because applicants have little information about an employer, they draw inferences from recruiters, timelines, and treatment. Signaling theory explains why. When one party has better information than the other, observable actions become signals, and their value depends on their reliability (Connelly et al., 2011; Spence, 1973). A job posting is meant to be a costly, credible signal that a position exists. Once candidates learn that a meaningful share of postings are not credible, every posting loses value, including the genuine ones. A meta-analysis of recruiting outcomes found that perceptions of the recruitment process and of recruiter behavior predict applicant attraction and job-pursuit intentions (Chapman et al., 2005). Cable and Turban (2003) showed that organizational reputation shapes how job seekers value a job and the pay premium they require to accept it.
The 2026 ResumeBuilder data show candidates acting on these signals. Respondents reported that they now check when a role was first posted (34%), verify openings on employer career sites (32%), avoid repeatedly reposted roles (27%), and in some cases avoid particular employers (11%) (Haller, 2026). In practical terms, a ghost posting can screen out the careful, well-informed applicants an employer most wants. They have learned to discount stale or recycled ads.
Recruiting efficiency and data quality inside the firm. Ghost postings generate applications that someone must store, screen, or ignore. Greenhouse reported a 26% quarterly rise in recruiter workload in late 2024. It also found that only 4% of roughly 6,500 companies on its platform contacted all rejected applicants in the second quarter of that year (Greenhouse, 2024; King, 2024). Inflated applicant volume also corrupts the metrics organizations use to manage recruiting, such as time-to-fill, applicants per hire, and source effectiveness. When a share of requisitions were never meant to close, those metrics stop describing reality.
Spillover to customers. The best documented example of candidate experience affecting revenue comes from Virgin Media in the United Kingdom. An analysis presented at LinkedIn's Talent Connect conference found that about 18% of the firm's rejected candidates were also customers. Of roughly 123,000 rejected candidates a year, an estimated 7,500 cancelled their subscriptions within a month, costing about £4.4 million annually in direct revenue (LinkedIn Talent Solutions, 2017). Virgin Media's case involved poor treatment of rejected applicants, not ghost postings as such. The mechanism transfers directly, though. Consumer-facing brands that let their hiring funnels mislead applicants are mistreating potential customers.
Legal and regulatory exposure. Until recently, ghost postings were mostly legal. That is changing quickly, as I discuss below. For multi-jurisdiction employers, the bigger risk may be operational rather than punitive. They may lack any reliable system for knowing which of their postings, across which boards, reflect a real and current vacancy (Fisher Phillips, 2026).
Individual Wellbeing and Stakeholder Impacts
Candidates. Applicant-reactions research gives us a well-tested lens for what happens to people on the receiving end. Gilliland (1993) drew on organizational justice theory to propose that applicants judge selection systems on procedural rules, including honesty, timely feedback, and two-way communication, and on interpersonal treatment. Those judgments then shape their attitudes and behavior. Hausknecht et al. (2004) confirmed in a meta-analysis that applicant perceptions of fairness relate to attraction to the organization, intentions to recommend it, and intentions to accept an offer. McCarthy et al. (2017) reviewed the following decade of research. They concluded that applicant perceptions have meaningful consequences for applicant behavior, wellbeing, and organizational outcomes.
Ghost postings violate several of Gilliland's procedural rules at once: honesty, feedback, and consistency. The 2026 ResumeBuilder survey describes the human cost. Thirty-nine percent of respondents reported more stress or frustration, 20% felt less motivated to keep applying, and 12% paused or abandoned their search. Ten percent stayed in a job they wanted to leave, and 8% believed they missed another opportunity. Time losses were not trivial either. Roughly a third of respondents estimated they had spent four or more hours pursuing suspected ghost jobs, and 8% reported spending more than 20 hours (Haller, 2026). Revelio Labs, analyzing candidates' online interview reviews, found that mentions of recruiter ghosting rose by 120% over five years (Hao & Simon, 2023). Even allowing for changes in who writes reviews, that is a striking shift in how candidates describe the process.
There is a psychological contract dimension here as well. A psychological contract is an individual's belief about the reciprocal obligations between themselves and an organization (Rousseau, 1995). These beliefs begin to form during recruitment, when candidates infer what the organization has promised. Research on psychological contract breach shows that perceived broken promises produce feelings of violation, especially when the breach seems intentional or unfair (Robinson & Morrison, 2000). An applicant who invests hours in interviews for a role that never existed is likely to experience exactly that. In the 2026 survey, 32% said they had become less trusting of employers, and the same share said they trust online job listings less (Haller, 2026).
Current employees. Insiders are a stakeholder group that gets less attention. Several of the motives managers reported were directed at existing staff: suggesting relief was coming, or implying that people were replaceable (ResumeBuilder.com, 2024). Analysts at Staffing Industry Analysts have noted that ghost postings can create a false internal sense of growth (Alvarez, 2026). When relief does not arrive, the predictable result is cynicism about leadership communication. Bowen and Ostroff (2004) argued that HR systems shape climate when their messages are distinctive, consistent, and backed by consensus. A posting that says "we are hiring" while workloads never ease is a textbook inconsistent message.
The labor market and policymakers. Ghost postings also impose costs on people who never apply. JOLTS openings are a closely watched indicator of labor demand. If some openings reflect advertisements rather than genuine recruiting, the data overstate tightness. Ng (2024) suggested that ghost postings may help explain the shift in the Beveridge curve, the historical relationship between vacancies and unemployment. Gallego's letter to the BLS asked how the agency defines "actively recruiting" and whether it would consider a time-to-fill measure (Gallego, 2026). Individual employers contribute only a little to this problem, but every one of them contributes.
Evidence-Based Organizational Responses
The regulatory movement gives leaders a practical reason to act. The research gives a better one: honest hiring processes are linked to stronger attraction, better candidate behavior, and healthier employment relationships. Table 1 summarizes five responses, and the subsections that follow draw on documented organizational practice. None of these examples is a perfect model. Each shows a piece of what good practice looks like.
Table 1: Evidence-Based Responses to Ghost Job Postings and Candidate Ghosting
Response | Evidence Base | Key Practices | Illustrative Examples |
Requisition integrity and posting governance | Signaling theory; legal analyses of NY S8877 | Tie every posting to an approved requisition; expiry dates; takedown ownership | University of Louisville evergreen requisitions; Indeed ghost-job policy |
Transparent posting disclosures | Realistic job previews; Ontario ESA rules | Label vacancy status, timeline, and talent-pool postings in plain language | Government of Ontario; Queen's University |
Closing the loop with candidates | Applicant reactions and organizational justice research | Response standards, decision timelines, outcome notices | Circle Back Initiative employers (Allianz Partners Australia, RMIT Training, Affinity Education Group); Greenhouse badges |
Platform and partner accountability | Consumer-protection enforcement; platform policies | Vendor contracts, syndication maps, responsiveness signals | LinkedIn; Indeed responsive employer badges; Texas AG probe |
Measuring integrity and leading honestly inside | Candidate-experience economics; HR system strength | Posting-to-hire and response metrics; no postings as internal pressure | Virgin Media; Planet |
Requisition Integrity and Posting Governance
The most basic response is to make sure that every public posting maps to a real, approved decision to hire. That sounds obvious. In practice, posting authority, budget authority, and takedown responsibility often sit with different people and systems. Signaling theory tells us that a signal is only valuable if it is reliable (Connelly et al., 2011). Governance is how an organization keeps its signals reliable at scale.
Legal commentators have converged on similar advice. Fisher Phillips (2026) recommends that employers map every place their ads appear, including career sites, job boards, staffing agencies, and automated distribution tools. It also recommends separating active, budgeted roles from pipeline postings, setting a process for estimating and updating expected fill dates, and assigning clear ownership for takedowns. Foley & Lardner attorneys recommend auditing all live postings, building deactivation protocols, and deciding deliberately whether to disclose pipeline recruiting (Mason & Howard, 2026).
Effective approaches:
Requisition-first posting: Configure the applicant tracking system so that no external posting can go live without an approved requisition and a named owner.
Distinct pipeline requisitions: Create a separate requisition type for evergreen or talent-pool recruiting, with its own labeling and review rules.
Mandatory expiry dates: Give every posting an end date and require a documented decision to extend it.
Takedown service levels: Commit to removing filled or frozen postings across all channels within a set period. New York's bill would set that period at two weeks.
Quarterly posting audits: Reconcile live postings against open requisitions and approved headcount.
The University of Louisville's use of evergreen requisitions shows how pipeline recruiting can be built into the system rather than hidden. Its Workday guidance describes evergreen requisitions as the vehicle for seasonal, high-volume, or hard-to-fill roles such as part-time lecturers. Recruiters regularly review new applicants and disposition those not selected. When a preferred candidate is identified, the recruiter creates a linked regular requisition and moves the candidate onto it (University of Louisville, n.d.). The documentation does not describe how such postings are labeled for applicants, so this is a partial model. The structural point still holds. Pipeline recruiting is managed as a distinct, accountable process instead of a disguised vacancy.
Indeed offers a platform-side version of the same discipline. In a May 2026 statement, Indeed's vice president of trust and safety said the company does not allow ghost jobs on its platform. Every posting is expected to be tied to a real employer actively hiring for a specific role, and postings showing no genuine intent to hire are removed. The company described monitoring for anomalies such as postings that never generate employer responses, and said it can disable accounts that violate its policies (Schemmel, 2026). Employers who syndicate widely should assume such platform rules will tighten. Internal governance is cheaper than having accounts flagged.
A common pitfall is to treat governance as a one-time cleanup. Foley's attorneys note that a sudden mass takedown can be read internally as a hiring freeze, so it needs to be paired with clear communication (Mason & Howard, 2026). The goal is a steady state in which postings are accurate by default, not an annual purge.
Transparent Posting Disclosures
The second response is to tell candidates the truth about what a posting represents. That includes whether a vacancy exists, roughly when the employer expects to hire, and whether the posting is for a future talent pool. This is the logic behind the new disclosure laws. It also has a solid research foundation in the literature on realistic job previews (RJPs), which give candidates accurate information, including the less attractive parts, before they commit. Early meta-analytic work found that RJPs lower initial expectations and modestly reduce turnover (Premack & Wanous, 1985). Earnest et al. (2011) found that RJPs work largely by signaling organizational honesty, which builds trust. Disclosure of hiring intent is, in effect, a realistic preview of the hiring process itself.
Effective approaches:
Plain-language status labels: State at the top of each posting whether it is for a current vacancy, a future vacancy with an expected date, or a talent pool.
Expected timelines: Give an expected decision window for current vacancies and update it if plans change.
Honest talent-pool invitations: Present pipeline postings as invitations to join a community, with a clear explanation of what happens to applications.
Jurisdiction-ready templates: Build templates that meet the strictest applicable rule, so the same language can be used across locations.
Pair disclosure with pay and process information: Include pay ranges, stages, and any use of AI in screening where the law requires it or trust benefits from it.
The Government of Ontario provides the most fully implemented example. Under amendments to the Employment Standards Act, 2000 that took effect on January 1, 2026, employers with 25 or more employees must state in publicly advertised postings whether the posting is for an existing vacancy (Government of Ontario, 2026). The same package requires a pay range of no more than $50,000 where pay is disclosed as a range, disclosure of artificial intelligence used to screen or select applicants, and a ban on requiring "Canadian experience." Employers must keep copies of postings and related application forms for three years (Law & Gould, 2025). Ontario's approach does not prohibit talent-pool recruiting. It requires employers to say when they are doing it.
Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, shows what implementation looks like inside a large employer. In December 2025 the university announced that its human resources team was updating processes, tools, and systems, including its CareerQ recruitment platform, to meet the new requirements by the effective date. It also planned training and information sessions with updated templates for people leaders (Queen's University, 2025). The emphasis on equipping hiring managers, rather than leaving compliance to HR alone, is the right one. Hiring managers make most of the decisions that disclosure is meant to describe.
New York's bill, Senate Bill S8877, would go considerably further on timing. Employers with at least 100 employees, and third-party posting entities, would have to include one of three statements in bold capital letters. A role to be filled within 90 days would need an intended fill date. A role to be filled later would need a "no sooner than" date. Where no hire is expected, the ad would have to say there is no current vacancy and that résumés are being collected for future openings (Battaglia et al., 2026; Lavin & DiMichele, 2026). The bill passed the Senate on April 28, 2026 and the Assembly on June 2, 2026 (New York State Senate, 2026). As of this writing in October 2026, the Senate's public record shows no delivery to or action by Governor Hochul. Law firm commentary notes that passed bills are typically sent to the governor in batches late in the year, and that the bill would take effect immediately if signed (Maurer, 2026; Popper & Heaney, 2026).
A common pitfall is to treat disclosure as boilerplate. If every posting carries the same hedged language, candidates will learn to ignore it. Attorneys have also warned that New York's bill offers no safe harbor when hiring timelines legitimately change (Fisher Phillips, 2026). Disclosures therefore need a process for updating them, not only a template for writing them.
Closing the Loop With Candidates
The third response addresses employer ghosting directly. Organizations should commit to telling every candidate where they stand, at least after they have invested meaningful effort. Of all the procedural rules that Gilliland (1993) identified, timely feedback and honest explanation are among the easiest to implement and among the most often neglected. Applicant-reactions research consistently links these interpersonal and informational aspects of justice to attraction and recommendation intentions (Hausknecht et al., 2004; McCarthy et al., 2017).
The scale of neglect is striking. Greenhouse's 2024 survey found that 61% of job seekers had been ghosted after an interview (Greenhouse, 2024). Greenhouse data cited by Fortune indicated that more than 14 million applications went completely ignored in a single quarter of 2024 (Constantz, 2025).
Effective approaches:
Published response standards: Commit publicly to acknowledging every application and notifying every applicant of the outcome.
Stage-based service levels: Set firmer commitments as candidate investment grows. A phone call or personal note is appropriate after interviews.
Decision deadlines: Adopt a maximum time from final interview to decision notice. Ontario's 45-day rule is a useful floor.
Close-out on cancelled roles: When a requisition is frozen or cancelled, tell active candidates promptly and honestly.
Automation with a human tone: Use templated messages for volume while keeping the content specific and respectful.
The Circle Back Initiative, founded by Steve Gard of Talentrich in Australia, offers a public, auditable version of this commitment. Allianz Partners Australia joined in February 2021, becoming one of more than 60 participating employers. It committed to respond to every candidate, to remove "only shortlisted candidates will be contacted" from its ads, and to send every applicant an acknowledgement and every unsuccessful applicant an outcome message. It also asked interviewing managers to give constructive feedback to unsuccessful interview-stage candidates. Its head of people and culture framed candidates as customers (Insurance Business, 2021).
RMIT Training, part of RMIT University's education group, joined in 2022 under the same standards. It displays a Circle Back badge on its careers page and job ads and must renew its commitment each year (RMIT University, 2022). Affinity Education Group, an early childhood education and care provider, was re-accredited in January 2024. Its talent acquisition team follows up with candidates by phone and connects them with centre management early in the process (The Sector, 2024). Across insurance, higher education, and child care, the common thread is a simple public promise backed by annual renewal.
Greenhouse built a related mechanism into its platform in 2024. It began testing four employer badges, one of which, "communicative," recognizes employers that do not ghost candidates and that close out candidates on closed jobs (Constantz, 2025; King, 2024). Its co-founder said the bar was set deliberately high so that the badges would mean something.
A common pitfall is to promise more than the team can deliver. A public response pledge that is routinely broken does more damage than no pledge at all. Commitments should be sized to recruiter capacity, and capacity should be protected, partly by not posting jobs that will generate applications nobody intends to review.
Platform and Partner Accountability
The fourth response recognizes that ghost postings are often produced by the hiring ecosystem, not only by the employer. Job boards scrape and republish listings. Staffing firms advertise on clients' behalf. Applicant tracking systems syndicate automatically. Regulators are now looking at this ecosystem as a whole. New York's bill applies to third-party posting entities as well as employers, and requires employers to notify those entities when a role is filled if they know or should know about the listing (Lavin & DiMichele, 2026).
Effective approaches:
Syndication mapping: Maintain a current inventory of every channel and partner that publishes the organization's jobs.
Contractual takedown terms: Require staffing partners and job-distribution vendors to remove or update postings within defined periods.
Use responsiveness signals: Turn on platform features that show candidates whether an employer is actively reviewing applications, and keep them accurate.
Monitor scraped listings: Periodically search major boards for outdated copies of the organization's postings and request removal.
Align with platform policies: Treat job boards' authenticity rules as minimum standards, not obstacles.
LinkedIn illustrates both the problem and the beginnings of a platform response. In early 2025 the company began testing "responsiveness insights" that indicate whether an employer is actively reviewing candidates for a given posting, with a broader rollout planned (Constantz, 2025). In July 2026, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced an investigation into whether LinkedIn had advertised and profited from ghost jobs. He issued a civil investigative demand seeking documents on the company's marketing, its verification practices for job listings, and its representations to paying Premium subscribers (Office of the Texas Attorney General, 2026). LinkedIn responded that its policies require postings to be authentic and accurately represented, and pointed to its response-time and active-review signals and its investment in job verification features (Fox Business, 2026). The investigation was unresolved at the time of writing. The consumer-protection theory it rests on deserves employers' attention, because a platform under that kind of scrutiny has every reason to push the duty of accuracy back onto the employers who post.
Indeed has used responsiveness signals for longer. It has issued "responsive employer" badges since 2018 to companies that reply to more than half of candidate messages, and in 2023 it added labels showing an employer's median response time (Constantz, 2025). For employers, these signals cut both ways. They reward organizations that respond and expose those that do not.
Platforms have also invested in verification, though so far mostly in one direction. In 2025 Greenhouse partnered with the identity company CLEAR to let candidates verify their identity in response to employer concerns about fraudulent applicants (Greenhouse, 2025). The tool says nothing about whether the job is real. Leaders who want candidates to accept identity verification should expect candidates, and regulators, to ask for equivalent assurance about the opportunity.
A common pitfall is to assume that a posting removed from the corporate careers site has disappeared. Fisher Phillips (2026) notes that penalties under New York's bill would apply per platform, so a single stale listing copied across several boards could multiply exposure.
Measuring Hiring Integrity and Leading Honestly Inside
The fifth response is about leadership. What gets measured shapes what gets managed. And the most corrosive motives for ghost postings, such as making employees feel replaceable or signaling relief that is not coming, are leadership choices, not process failures. HR system research suggests that employees read HR practices as messages about what leaders value. Practices that are inconsistent with what leaders say weaken the climate they are meant to build (Bowen & Ostroff, 2004).
Effective approaches:
Integrity metrics: Track the posting-to-hire ratio, average posting age, the share of postings older than a set threshold, and the share of applicants who receive an outcome.
Candidate feedback loops: Survey candidates, including rejected ones, and report the results to leadership alongside time-to-fill and cost-per-hire.
Explicit prohibitions: Make clear in policy that postings may not be used to signal growth, pressure employees, or benchmark the market without disclosure.
Honest internal communication: When headcount is frozen, tell employees directly instead of keeping postings live as reassurance.
Executive ownership: Assign a senior leader accountability for hiring integrity, including compliance with disclosure rules.
Virgin Media shows the value of putting a price on candidate treatment. Once the company quantified the cost of poor experiences among rejected candidates, roughly £4.4 million a year in cancelled subscriptions, candidate experience became a commercial issue. Leaders responded with interview training for hundreds of hiring managers, executive videos on how candidates should be treated, an annual award for the best candidate experience, and continuous candidate feedback collection. The company reported that the net promoter score for its sales recruitment rose from −57 to +11 after retraining (LinkedIn Talent Solutions, 2017). Most organizations have never estimated the commercial cost of misleading or ignored applicants. Doing so changes the conversation.
Planet, a satellite imaging company, offers a smaller-scale example of discipline paying off operationally. Working toward Greenhouse's candidate-experience badges, its talent acquisition team retrained hiring managers and standardized interview questions and criteria. With four recruiters managing about 2,000 active applicants across 34 open roles, the company reported a 43% year-over-year reduction in time to hire and a 5% rise in offer acceptance (Constantz, 2025). Several factors are at work there, and the result should not be attributed to any single practice. It does suggest that honest, well-run processes are compatible with efficiency.
A common pitfall is to measure only what flatters the function. Application volume can look like employer-brand strength when it partly reflects ghost postings attracting applicants who will never hear back. Integrity metrics need to be reported alongside volume metrics, not instead of them.
Building Long-Term Hiring Integrity
The responses above can be implemented within a quarter or two. Sustaining them requires changes in how organizations think about postings, pipelines, and trust. I see three pillars.
Treating Every Posting as a Public Promise
The first pillar is cultural. Organizations need to stop treating job postings as free advertising and start treating them as public representations, closer to a product claim than a billboard. The legal trend points the same way. Ontario requires vacancy disclosure. New York's bill would attach penalties to inaccurate timing statements. The Texas investigation of LinkedIn applies consumer-protection logic to job listings (Government of Ontario, 2026; New York State Senate, 2026; Office of the Texas Attorney General, 2026). Employment lawyers describe the arc as a shift from pay transparency to hiring transparency (Alvarez, 2026; Williamson & Evans, 2026).
Organizations that got ahead of pay transparency laws generally found compliance easier and trust benefits greater than those that waited for each state to act. The same is likely true here. Multi-state employers in particular should consider a single standard built to the strictest jurisdiction, an option that Foley's attorneys recommend weighing against state-by-state compliance (Mason & Howard, 2026). A posting policy stating that the organization advertises only roles it intends to fill, and labels everything else, is short, defensible, and easy to explain to candidates and employees.
Building Honest Talent Pipelines
The second pillar addresses the legitimate need behind many ghost postings: keeping a warm pool of candidates for roles that open often or unpredictably. The answer is not to forbid pipeline recruiting. It is to make it honest and to give candidates something of value in return.
Practical tools include talent communities that candidates join knowingly, evergreen requisitions that are labeled as such, periodic updates to people in the pool, and clear rules about how long applications are retained and how they are used. The 2026 ResumeBuilder survey found that 19% of respondents believed employers had collected résumés without clearly disclosing that purpose (Haller, 2026). Ontario and New York both explicitly allow talent-pool postings as long as they are disclosed (Lavin & DiMichele, 2026; Law & Gould, 2025). That shows regulators are not hostile to pipeline recruiting itself. What they object to is pretending.
There is a reciprocity argument here that leaders should take seriously. Employers increasingly complain about the flood of low-quality and AI-generated applications, and some are adopting tools to verify that applicants are who they say they are (Greenhouse, 2025). Candidates have their own version of that complaint about postings. An employer that asks applicants for verified identities, tailored cover letters, and hours of assessments, while offering no assurance that the job exists, is asking for trust it has not offered in return. Honest pipeline practices are part of restoring a fair exchange. They also make it more reasonable to ask candidates for the effort good selection requires.
Workforce planning is the upstream partner here. Many ghost postings exist because hiring managers fear losing a headcount approval, or because budgets are approved too late for normal recruiting timelines. Closer coordination between finance, workforce planning, and talent acquisition reduces the temptation to keep phantom requisitions alive as insurance.
Making Trust Measurable and Shared
The third pillar is measurement and shared accountability. Trust in hiring is a shared resource. Each employer that posts ghost jobs or ghosts candidates makes the market harder for every employer, because candidates discount all signals. Some of that shared accountability will come from regulators. Gallego's questions to the BLS about time-to-fill measures and verification of "actively recruiting" suggest that the federal data infrastructure may eventually ask employers for more (Gallego, 2026). Some will come from platforms, through responsiveness badges, verification features, and enforcement of authenticity rules (Schemmel, 2026). And some can come from employers themselves, through voluntary commitments like the Circle Back Initiative's.
Leaders should also be realistic about what measurement can and cannot do. A posting-to-hire ratio will never be zero, and it should not be. Some searches fail honestly, some budgets are cut after a posting goes live, and some roles are genuinely hard to fill. The goal is not to punish every unfilled requisition. It is to make the reasons visible, so that legitimate failures can be explained to candidates and deliberate misuse becomes hard to hide. Organizations that can explain why a role closed without a hire, and show that the candidates were told, are in a very different position, legally and reputationally, from those that cannot.
Inside organizations, the integrity metrics described earlier should become part of routine talent reporting to executives and boards. These include posting-to-hire ratios, posting age, outcome-notification rates, and candidate trust scores. Boards already ask about employee engagement and retention. Candidate trust is the leading indicator that comes before both.
Conclusion
Ghost job postings persist because their costs are spread thinly across many people while their perceived benefits accrue to a few managers. A candidate loses a few hours, an employee waits for relief that does not come, and a data series overstates demand by some fraction. None of these losses shows up on the poster's budget. The evidence reviewed here suggests that these costs add up. In the most recent survey, 86% of job seekers report encountering suspected ghost jobs, and roughly a third say the experience has made them trust employers less (Haller, 2026). Platform data suggest that something on the order of one in five postings may fit the definition. Labor economists and legislators have begun to ask whether the practice distorts the data that guide monetary policy.
The research on applicant reactions, signaling, realistic job previews, and psychological contracts all points in the same direction. Candidates notice how they are treated. They infer what an organization values from how it recruits, and they carry those inferences into their decisions as applicants, employees, and customers. Honesty in hiring is not just compliance. It is one of the earliest and most visible tests of whether an organization means what it says.
The disclosure laws now arriving, from Ontario's 2026 rules to New York's pending S8877 and the proposals in other states, will force some organizations to change. The ones that benefit most will be those that change first and treat the law as a floor.
Practical takeaways:
Audit now: Reconcile every live posting, on every channel, against approved requisitions and remove or relabel anything that does not match.
Label honestly: State vacancy status and expected timing on each posting, and present pipeline recruiting openly as a talent pool.
Close the loop: Publish response standards, notify interviewed candidates of outcomes within a set period, and tell candidates promptly when roles are cancelled.
Manage the ecosystem: Map syndication, write takedown duties into vendor contracts, and keep platform responsiveness signals accurate.
Measure integrity: Report posting-to-hire ratios, posting age, and outcome-notification rates to leadership alongside volume and speed metrics.
Lead honestly inside: Never use postings to pressure, placate, or mislead current employees, and communicate hiring freezes directly.
Research Infographic
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Jonathan H. Westover, PhD, Chief Research Officer (Nexus Institute for Work and AI); Co-Founder & Chief Workforce and Learning Officer (Future State University); Founder & CEO (Human Capital Innovations); Professor of Organizational Leadership & Change (UVU). Read Jonathan Westover's executive profile here.
Suggested Citation: Westover, J. H. (2026). Phantom Openings: Ghost Job Postings, the New Disclosure Laws, and How Leaders Can Restore Honesty to Hiring. Human Capital Leadership Review, 40(4). doi.org/10.70175/hclreview.2020.40.4.1
