Do Job Search Tools Catch Ghost Jobs? What 5 Popular Tools Check and Miss
Quick answer: Mostly no. None of five popular job search tools, LinkedIn, Jobright, Teal, Simplify and Seera, publishes a ghost-job detector. LinkedIn comes closest with verification badges and a "reposted" label; Seera only lists postings that are live on employers' own career sites, but it does not score ghost risk either. The rules that dedicated ghost-job checkers rely on are blunt: when we ran three of them on 404,470 real postings, roughly 8 in 10 tripped at least one. Use a flag as a reason to check the posting, and start your search from postings taken from employers' own career sites.
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How this was put together: each tool is described from its own pages and help center, opened on October 20, 2026 (Teal's pricing page as recorded on October 14). Where a company does not say whether it checks for ghost jobs, we say so rather than guess. The rule results come from Seera's job index, built from the career sites of more than 36,000 companies. On October 20, 2026 we ran the rules on all 404,470 searchable open postings, and looked for reposts among the 59,268 postings employers took down in the previous 14 days (sites that went offline entirely are excluded). Pay written into the job description was checked on a near-random sample of 5,742 open postings. No company, title or posting is named; only totals and shares are published. Seera is one of the five tools, and we say where it falls short.
Key Takeaways
Ghost-job checks look at the posting, while the question that matters, whether anyone is hiring, sits inside the employer.
| What we found (October 20, 2026) | Result | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Tools of the five that publish a ghost-job check | 0 | A clean result in a job search tool is not a ghost-job all-clear |
| Real postings older than 60 days | 53% | An age rule flags half the market |
| Postings showing no pay anywhere (sample) | 68% | Missing pay is normal, not a warning on its own |
| Postings tripping at least one of three common rules (sample) | ~8 in 10 | A ghost-job flag means "check", not "skip" |
| Closed postings that came back as a new posting | 17.6%, 99% with a fresh date | A repost looks brand new to any tool that only reads the date |
Table of Contents
- What counts as a ghost job?
- What ghost-job detectors check
- What happens when you run those rules on real postings?
- Reposts: the signal that hides itself
- The five tools: what each checks and what it misses
- What no tool can see
- How to use a ghost-job flag
- Where does Seera fit?
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Useful sources and further reading
What Counts as a Ghost Job?
A ghost job is a posting for a role the employer does not intend to fill, at least not now. It might be kept up to collect resumes, to look like the company is growing, or simply because nobody took it down after the budget was cut. FOX6 News, reporting on an analysis by the hiring software company Greenhouse in January 2025, put it this way:
"Ghost jobs are job postings published online with no intention of actively hiring."
The same report said Greenhouse found between 18% and 22% of job postings in a quarter fit that description. Three other kinds of posting often get lumped in with ghost jobs, and a good tool should tell them apart:
- Expired postings are real jobs that have closed while a copy lives on somewhere. That is a freshness problem, covered in how to find fresh job listings and skip expired ones.
- Scam postings are fake jobs used to collect money or personal data. They are fraud, not slow hiring.
- Pipeline postings openly collect applications for future roles. They are not ghosts when they say so.
Lawmakers are starting to draw the same line. In June 2026, New York's legislature passed bill S8877, which would make larger employers and job sites label whether a posting is for a current vacancy, according to HR Dive. Its required wording for a real opening reads:
"This position is for a current vacancy, and the employer intends to fill this position by (date)."
Note what the bill asks for: a statement of intent. Intent is exactly what a job search tool cannot read from the outside.
What Ghost-Job Detectors Check
Dedicated ghost-job checkers, mostly browser extensions that score each posting you open, work from signals visible on the posting or across postings. These are the common ones, and the catch with each:
| Signal | What it can show | Why it misleads |
|---|---|---|
| Posting age | A role open for months may be forgotten | Evergreen and hard-to-fill roles stay up for months too, and a repost resets the date |
| Reposts | An employer cycling the same role | Reposting is also how employers refresh a listing or reopen a search |
| No salary | Less commitment to a real budget | Most genuine postings publish no pay |
| Near-duplicate postings | The same role posted many times | Also how employers advertise several seats or teams |
| Vague description | No real team or scope behind it | Hard to score fairly; short postings are common in some industries |
| Company signals | Hiring freezes, layoffs, few hires | Usually from outside data that lags; one team can hire while another freezes |
Every one of these is a proxy. None of them can see whether a recruiter is reading applications.
What Happens When You Run Those Rules on Real Postings?
We took three rules that are easy to state and easy to measure, and ran them on postings taken from employers' own career sites, where every job is at least a real posting the company published:
- Old: posted more than 60 days ago.
- No pay: no salary in the posting's pay fields and no pay figure in the description.
- Duplicate: another open posting from the same company with the same title and location.
| Rule | Share of open postings flagged |
|---|---|
| Older than 30 days | 69% |
| Older than 60 days | 53% |
| No pay figure anywhere (sample of 5,742) | 68% |
| Duplicate of another open posting | 5.1% |
| At least one of the three (sample) | 85% |
| All three at once (sample) | 1.4% |
The sample leans slightly older than the full index (61% older than 60 days, against 53%), so the true "at least one" share is probably a little lower. It is still roughly 8 in 10. Pay is the main reason: 87% of sampled postings had nothing in their pay fields, and only about a fifth of those wrote a figure into the description instead.
The takeaway is not that 8 in 10 jobs are ghosts. Greenhouse's estimate is closer to 1 in 5. It is that these rules fire on almost everything, so a checker built on them will flag most of the jobs you could get. Only the rare posting that trips all three at once (1.4%) stands out from the crowd.
Reposts: the Signal That Hides Itself
Reposting is the signal most often tied to ghost jobs, and it is also the one most tools cannot see. In the 14 days to October 20, employers in Seera's index took down 59,268 postings. Of those, 10,407 (17.6%) came back as a new posting from the same company with the same title and location:
- 85% reappeared within a day, usually as the old one disappeared.
- 99% of the new postings carried a posted date within a week of reappearing, so the role looked brand new.
- 66% had the same text as the posting they replaced.
- The original had been up for a median of only 18 days before it was swapped out.
The behaviour is concentrated. 958 of the 6,802 employers that closed a posting in the window (14%) reposted at least one, and the ten heaviest reposters made up 43% of all reposts. Leave those ten out and the repost share is still 13%.
For a ghost-job check, this is the problem: a repost resets the one signal most tools read, the date. A rule like "older than 60 days" sees a fresh posting. Only a tool that remembers the earlier posting, or a job seeker who saved it, can tell that the role is going around again.
The Five Tools: What Each Checks and What It Misses
These are the five tools from our comparison of free AI job search tools, looked at again for ghost jobs. "Not stated" means we found no such check on the company's own pages.
| Tool | Ghost-job check it publishes | What it does show | What it misses |
|---|---|---|---|
| None as such | Verification badges on some job posts; a "reposted" label on some listings | Whether the role is being filled; how many times it was reposted | |
| Jobright | Not stated for ghost jobs | Says it filters out fake job listings | Its criteria are not published, and fake is not the same as ghost |
| Teal | Not stated | Your own record of every job you saved and applied to | Any check on the posting itself |
| Simplify | Not stated | Your application history in its tracker | Any check on the posting itself |
| Seera | None as such | Only postings still live on the employer's own career site, from the last 60 days by default | Reposts, and whether the employer is hiring |
What it checks: some job posts carry a verification badge. LinkedIn's Help Center says the badge shows verified information about the company and the person who posted the job, such as a confirmed work email. Some listings also show a "reposted" label.
What it misses: LinkedIn's Help Center states that applying to a job with a verification badge does not mean you are more likely to be hired. A verified poster can still post a role nobody plans to fill, and the "reposted" label does not say how many times or since when. A missing badge proves nothing either, since not every employer has gone through verification.
Jobright
What it checks: a post on Jobright's blog says it identifies and filters out fake job listings with a filtering and verification system, so that users only see genuine opportunities.
What it misses: the post is about fake listings, which are a scam problem, and it does not say what the filter looks at. We found no Jobright page that describes a check for ghost jobs or reposts.
Teal
What it checks: Teal is a job tracker. The plan features on its pricing page, as we recorded them for our October 14, 2026 comparison, cover tracking, resumes, keyword matching and AI writing credits, with no ghost-job check.
What it helps with: because it keeps a record of every job you save, a tracker is how you notice a role you applied to reappear under a new date, the repost pattern no date-based rule can catch.
Simplify
What it checks: Simplify fills in application forms, tracks applications and recommends jobs. Its homepage lists no check for ghost, stale or reposted jobs.
What it helps with: like Teal, its tracker gives you your own history to compare against when a role you already applied to shows up again.
Seera
What it checks: Seera takes its postings from the career sites of more than 36,000 companies and re-checks them regularly, so a posting the employer has closed drops out of your matches. By default, matches only include postings from the past 60 days. That removes expired copies, the most common kind of dead listing.
What it misses: Seera does not score ghost risk or flag reposts. A role the employer keeps live on its own site, whether or not anyone is reviewing applications, will still appear.
What No Tool Can See
A ghost job is defined by what happens after you apply: whether anyone screens the applications, interviews, and makes an offer. That record lives in the employer's hiring system. Public postings show only the outside, so every detector, including the dedicated ones, is estimating intent from proxies.
That is why the New York bill asks employers to state intent rather than asking job sites to guess it. Until labels like that are common, the most reliable signals are still the ones you collect yourself: whether a role you applied to keeps coming back, whether anyone ever replies, and what a recruiter says when you ask whether the role is open now.
How to Use a Ghost-Job Flag
Treat any flag, from a tool or from your own eye, as a prompt to spend two minutes checking before you spend an hour applying:
- Find the original. Open the role on the employer's own career site. If it is not there, it is not open, whatever the copy says.
- Check your own history. If your tracker shows you applied to the same title at the same company weeks ago, you are looking at a repost.
- Weigh the flags together. One flag on its own is normal; old, no pay and duplicated at once is rare enough to question.
- Ask. A short message to the recruiter or hiring manager asking whether the role is still being filled is the only check that reaches intent.
Where Does Seera Fit?
Seera handles the first step for you: every match comes from a posting that is live on the employer's own career site, from the last 60 days by default, and closed postings drop out. You still judge the rest, and Seera says so. It does not detect ghost jobs, submit applications, keep an application tracker or draft cover letters.
The first 3 matches cost nothing. If you want to know what sits behind them first, see the matching method and its measured accuracy.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Can AI detect ghost jobs?
Only partly. A tool can read what a posting shows, such as its age, whether it was reposted, whether it names a salary and whether near-copies exist. It cannot see whether the employer is interviewing anyone. When we ran three common rules on postings from employers' own career sites, roughly 8 in 10 tripped at least one, so treat a ghost-job flag as a reason to check, not a verdict.
Does LinkedIn flag ghost jobs?
Not directly. LinkedIn shows verification badges on some job posts, which confirm details about the company and the person who posted, and it labels some listings as reposted. LinkedIn's own help pages say a verification badge does not mean you are more likely to be hired, and neither label says whether the role is really being filled.
Is a reposted job a ghost job?
Not necessarily. In Seera's index, 17.6% of the postings employers closed in a two-week window came back as a new posting for the same role, most within a day and almost all with a fresh posted date. Employers repost to refresh a listing, reopen a search or hire for more than one seat. A role reposted again and again with no change is the pattern worth questioning.
Does a job posting with no salary mean it is fake?
No. About 7 in 10 postings in a sample of employers' own career sites showed no pay figure at all, even counting pay written into the description. Missing pay is common on genuine postings, so it tells you little on its own. Where pay-transparency laws apply, a missing range is worth asking the recruiter about.
How common are ghost jobs?
Estimates vary with the definition. Greenhouse, a hiring software company, estimated that 18% to 22% of job postings in a quarter were ghost jobs, according to FOX6 News in January 2025. Because intent to hire is invisible from the outside, any estimate built only from public postings measures warning signs, not ghost jobs themselves.
Related Reading
- AI Job Search That Starts From Your Resume
- How to Find Fresh Job Listings and Avoid Expired Ones
- Best Free AI Job Search Tools in 2026, Compared
- How AI Matches Resumes to Job Descriptions, Explained
- How Accurate Is AI Job Matching? Match Scores Explained
- Job Search Portfolio: Build One That Gets You Interviews
Useful sources and further reading
- FOX6 News: 1 in 5 job postings aren't real, recent study finds (Austin Williams, January 14, 2025) — source of the ghost-job definition and Greenhouse's 18% to 22% estimate
- HR Dive: New York passes a bill aimed at halting "ghost jobs" (Laurel Kalser, June 11, 2026) — source of the S8877 requirements and quoted wording
- LinkedIn Help Center, "Verification badge on job posts", and Jobright's blog post comparing Jobright with LinkedIn (September 18, 2024), opened October 20, 2026 — sources of each company's own statements; not linked under our editorial standards
- Seera: AI Job Search — Seera's job index, match levels and pricing
- Seera job index, measured October 20, 2026 — posting ages, pay fields, duplicates, closures and reposts (aggregate counts only)
- Seera: Editorial standards — how we use our own data and write about other companies' products