Why do companies post fake jobs?

High churn pairs, where the same title and company are reposted every few weeks, are a strong ghost-job signal. Low-quality job boards amplify the problem by syndicating stale feeds.

Most of the reasons are mundane rather than sinister. Pipeline building is the commonest: a team expecting to hire in three months starts collecting applications now, so that when the requisition opens a shortlist already exists. From the inside that is prudent planning. From the outside it is indistinguishable from a role you could start next month.

Budget freezes produce the same effect. A role is approved, advertised, then frozen when the quarter turns out worse than forecast, and taking the listing down is nobody in particular’s job. The posting outlives the decision that created it.

Some postings are structural. Companies with continuous or high-volume hiring, agencies advertising for a bench, and staffing firms sourcing against anticipated client demand all run adverts that were never tied to one specific opening. Occasionally a listing exists to benchmark salaries or to project growth to the market.

Very little of this is aimed at you personally, which is cold comfort when it is your evening being spent. The useful response is not cynicism but triage: assume some share of any results page is not currently fillable, and concentrate your effort where the evidence of activity is strongest.

Use the Ghost Job Index for market-level context and scan individual URLs before you invest hours tailoring an application.