Press
We are a small research operation that watches job postings and records what happens to them. If you are writing about ghost jobs, hiring practices, or the labour market, here is what you can and cannot get from us.
The press contact for this page has not been set. Until it is, this page is not indexed — inviting a reporter to contact nobody in particular is worse than not having the page.
What we can give you
- Coverage numbers, current and dated. How many employers we watch, how many postings are in the record, how long the archive runs. They are below, read from the record itself rather than typed onto this page.
- Observations on specific postings we watch, with dates. What we saw and when we saw it.
- Explanations of how the systems work. Applicant tracking systems, evergreen requisitions, why a posting stays live after a hire, what employers can and cannot control. This is often the most useful thing we provide and it costs you nothing.
- Our methodology, in as much detail as you want it, including its limits. It is published and versioned, and previous versions stay reachable so a figure cited under one can be checked against the rules that produced it.
What we cannot give you
- A number for how many ghost jobs exist. Nobody has one. The Congressional Research Service confirmed in April 2025 that no official statistics exist. Our archive is weeks old and covers a few hundred employers. We are not going to invent a national figure and we would treat anyone who offers you one with suspicion.
- A judgment about a specific employer’s intent. We record what postings did. We do not know why, and the ordinary explanations are often boring and true.
- Anything systematic about LinkedIn, Indeed or ZipRecruiter. We do not crawl them — there is no crawl target and no adapter that resolves those hosts. We hold a small number of member-contributed sightings from LinkedIn, submitted with consent by people using our extension on pages they visited themselves. That is not a sample of anything and we will not generalize from it.
- A score or a risk rating. We do not produce one. Several other products do. Ours is a record, not an opinion.
Current coverage
These figures are 17 days old, and so is the count itself: we last totalled the record on September 20, 2026. The crawl may have run since. We are showing the last complete count rather than a partial one.
| Employers on the entity spine | 240,505 |
|---|---|
| Employers with observed job postings | 1,089 |
| Job postings in the record | 295,482 |
| Individual observations recorded | 429,838 |
| Distinct days observed | 31 |
| Postings we cannot date | 166,211 · 56.3% |
| Member-contributed sightings held across 229 listings | 282 |
| Sightings promoted into the posting record | 107,702 |
166,211 of 295,482 postings were already live when we first saw them, so we know our first sighting date and not the employer’s posting date. These are recorded as left-censored and excluded from every duration figure.
Where the postings come from
| Source | Postings |
|---|---|
| workday | 214,387 |
| themuse member-contributed | 164,040 |
| greenhouse | 6,980 |
| icims | 6,055 |
| socrata | 4,356 |
| adp_workforcenow | 2,503 |
| lever | 2,412 |
| ashby | 902 |
| workable | 93 |
| recruitee | 40 |
| member_sighting_linkedin member-contributed | 39 |
The record is not evenly spread across the platforms we watch. It is also why so much of it is undated: the Workday adapter never parses the posted date the board displays, because that field is relative text rather than a date, so every posting from it is recorded as left-censored by design.
What we hold a posted date for
| Date reported by the employer's system | 122,218 |
|---|---|
| No posted date available | 166,211 |
| System serves a date that is not a posting date | 2,200 |
| Collected by a halted backfill — excluded from findings | 4,853 |
Dates taken from Workday's detail endpoint by the one-time backfill of schema/080, which was halted on 403 responses and is unresolved with the vendor. Counted among postings because the postings are real; excluded from every duration figure and from every published finding.
Our limits, stated plainly
For roughly nine in ten postings in our record we do not know the original posting date. We know when we first saw it. We record that distinction on every posting and we exclude those postings from any finding about duration. The exact count and share are in the coverage figures above. We would rather publish a small defensible number than a large soft one.
Our crawl cadence is not yet uniform. Some employers are observed on most days, some on very few, and no employer in the record has been observed on every day since we started. We publish per-employer observation counts rather than implying a continuous coverage we do not have.
Not every row in our record came from our crawler. A small number arrived as member-contributed sightings. We keep the distinction on every row rather than flattening it, because where a fact came from is part of the fact. A sighting becomes part of the posting record only after being seen on two separate days, and stays marked as member-contributed permanently.
The record is concentrated. The great majority of the postings we hold come from one applicant tracking system. The breakdown is in the coverage figures above rather than a page away, because “postings across seven applicant tracking systems” is true and reads much broader than it is.
Definitions we use
- Observation
- A single recorded sighting of a posting at a point in time, with the date, the source, and the state we found it in.
- Left-censored
- A posting that already existed when we first saw it. We know our first sighting date. We do not know the employer’s posting date.
- Closed
- We observed the posting on the source, then observed it absent — twice, on runs we can vouch for. The close date is the first observation of absence, not the moment of removal.
- Sighting
- A record of a posting that a member saw on a page they visited themselves, submitted with consent through our browser extension. A sighting is not an observation.
- Ghosted
- You applied, never got a real reply, and the job came down or went back up without you. It describes what happened to the applicant, never what the employer intended.
External figures we cite, with attribution
| Figure | Source |
|---|---|
| 19% of job board ads in Q2 2026 were ghost jobs | Greenhouse, reported in the Wall Street Journal |
| 40% of hiring managers say their company posted a job it was not hiring for | ResumeBuilder, 2024 |
| 28% of Americans say it is a good time to find a quality job | Gallup |
| No official government statistics on ghost jobs exist | Congressional Research Service, April 2025 |
These are other people’s numbers. Ours are the coverage figures above.
Corrections
We publish our own errors at hiringrecord.com/corrections, with dates and what we did about them. If you find one, tell us and we will add it.
Publications
Numbered reports at hiringrecord.com/reports. Each one is a permanent citation target: the URL never changes and the page states its own version and date.