Forbes: 30% Of Job Postings Are Fake
June Zaccone
You're Not Bad At Job Hunting—30% Of Job Postings Are Fake
By Caroline Castrillon, Senior Contributor. Nov 18, 2025
You're not imagining it. Job hunting feels impossible right now because it actually is. You've polished your resume, customized cover letters and applied for hundreds of roles only to hear nothing back. One in three job postings never results in a hire, according to a MyPerfectResume analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data. In June 2025, employers reported 7.4 million openings but made only 5.2 million hires. That's more than 2.2 million ghost jobs that wasted countless hours of your time.
The emotional drain of job hunting is real because ghost jobs make it exponentially worse. These phantom job postings aren't just wasting your time. They're stalling your career while destroying your confidence.
Here's what's actually making job hunting so brutal right now and how to stop wasting time on ghost jobs.
Ghost Jobs Are a Permanent Fixture
For more than a decade after the Great Recession, job postings and actual hires stayed closely aligned. Then in 2021, job openings spiked above 11 million while hires hovered at 6 to 7 million. The "phantom gap" rose sharply to 38% as employers advertised nearly 4 million more positions than they were actually filling. Although hiring has cooled since then, the gap has never normalized. The ghost job rate has remained between 28% and 32% for years. This isn't a temporary distortion. It has become a structural feature of the job market.
Industries Where Ghost Jobs Hide
June 2025 BLS data reveals dramatic differences in the percentage of ghost jobs across industries:
- Government roles: 60%
- Education and health services: 50%
- Information: 48%
- Finance: 44%
- Leisure and hospitality: 2%
- Construction: -44% (more hires than openings)
A shocking six out of every 10 government job postings are ghost jobs. Agencies are required to post openings publicly even when they've already selected an internal candidate or when roles are frozen awaiting approval that may never come. The pattern extends across white-collar fields. Government, education, health services, information and finance all maintain large pools of unfilled postings that distort the hiring picture. By contrast, consumer-facing sectors like hospitality and construction show strong alignment between job postings and actual hires. If you're job hunting in government agencies, healthcare companies or financial firms, the odds that a posted role is a ghost job increase significantly.
Why Companies Post Ghost Jobs
"The U.S. labor market looks deceptively strong on paper. Millions of openings suggest opportunity, but many are illusions," says Jasmine Escalera, career expert at MyPerfectResume.
Companies keep ghost jobs active for several reasons:
- To build candidate pipelines for roles that might open later
- To signal growth during hiring freezes
- To leave approved positions stuck in limbo due to budget cuts
- To satisfy internal posting requirements or HR quotas
Some companies post jobs to test market conditions or gauge salary expectations without any immediate intention to hire. Others need to show a certain number of active job postings to satisfy internal HR metrics or convince investors that the company is growing. In some cases, managers post roles they hope to fill someday but lack current budget approval. The posting stays live indefinitely, collecting resumes that may never be reviewed.