The machine-checkable red flags in job listings

There is a category of bad listing you can detect without judgement calls. If the employer field is a lowercase fragment, or the company name is a placeholder, or the title is padded with urgency language, something upstream is wrong: either the posting was generated in bulk, or it was scraped and re-published by an aggregator, or nobody at the company reviewed it.

We run every ingested listing through a fixed set of these checks and keep the counts. The value is not any single flag but the ranking: knowing which failures are common tells you what to actually look at when you are scanning a results page quickly.

It is important to be precise about what this measures. These checks describe the quality of the listing data, not the intent behind the role. A well-formatted listing from a company with no intention of hiring will pass all of them. That is the job of the ghost-likelihood signal, which looks at behaviour over time rather than the shape of the text.

Used together the two answer different questions. The flags here tell you whether anyone was paying attention when the posting went up. Ghost likelihood tells you whether the posting is going anywhere.