GUIDE
"Ghost job" has become shorthand for any posting that feels off. But it describes something specific — and most of what frustrates job seekers is something more ordinary.
A ghost job is a posting for a role the employer has no current intention of filling — posted to collect résumés, project growth, or keep a pipeline warm. The defining feature is intent: the job was never really open. These are genuinely hard to identify from the outside, because the posting looks identical to a real one.
A stale posting is much more common and much less sinister: a real opening whose listing has gone out of date. The role was filled but the posting was never taken down. The posting was refreshed by an automated system long after hiring stopped. The board is showing you a copy that's months behind the employer's actual page. No deception — just decay.
Calling everything a ghost job leads to the wrong response. You can't do much about a true ghost job except move on. But stale postings are detectable: check whether the posting is still on the employer's own career page, check when it first appeared, check whether it's been refreshed without changes. A posting that's been continuously listed for 200 days with an unchanged description is telling you something — and what it's telling you is visible in its history, not its intent.
We don't label postings as ghost jobs — we can't see intent, and guessing would be dishonest. What we do is show you the observable facts: first seen, last verified, every refresh and edit, all observed on the employer's own career page. Old, refreshed, or oddly persistent — the history is there, and the judgment is yours.