As many as one in four job hunters have applied for so-called ‘ghost jobs’ which the company never actually intended to hire anyone for, data shows.
Ghost jobs are positions advertised on recruitment websites by firms who have no intention of hiring for them, or may not even have the role open.
According to data from HR, payroll and recruitment firm Employment Hero, employers may post ghost job adverts in order to build a candidate pipeline for future roles, test salary expectations or gauge interest from the market.
Younger people and graduates are especially suffering as a result of this, with more than a third, 37 per cent, saying they believe they have applied for a ghost role online.
This comes as part of a wider trend of ‘graduate ghosting’, where job seekers find themselves ignored by prospective employers even after having completed tests or exams as part of the hiring process.
Non-existent: Employment Hero says some employers may post ghost job adverts in order to build a candidate pipeline
As many as eight in ten people say they have applied for a role and received no response, while half say this is the most frustrating part of the job search.
Kevin Fitzgerald, UK managing director at Employment Hero, told This is Money: ‘The hiring system rewards visibility and optionality, not honesty, providing space for these ghost jobs.
‘Many employers post roles to test the market, benchmark salaries, build pipelines, or simply keep their brand visible, often without any real intention to hire.
‘Whilst it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how many ghost jobs are out there, what our research does show is that one in four UK workers believe they’ve applied for a role that didn’t genuinely exist, rising to more than a third of 18-34 year olds.’
On top of this, as few as 38 per cent of job roles that appear in online searches are relevant to the search terms, Employment Hero said, with job seekers instead facing a mass of potentially irrelevant results.
While ghost jobs are hugely inconvenient for job hunters, they aren’t usually malicious.
However, ghost roles have also been linked to phishing activity, where fraudsters use fake job adverts as a ruse to get people to send them their personal information.
It can be hard to differentiate between the two.
Fitzgerald said: ‘Fake listings designed to harvest personal data make matters worse, and combined with mass applications and poor communication, the labour market feels impersonal and broken.
‘Until recruitment is rebuilt around verified employers and real vacancies, ghost jobs will keep multiplying – and trust in the job market will continue to fall.’
Ghost roles destroyed my job hunt
Nathaniel McAllister, a 24-year-old recent graduate, has suffered as a result of ghost job adverts.
He said: ‘Ghost jobs are becoming a real problem, especially on LinkedIn. They make the whole job-hunting experience even worse. I was made redundant in March 2025, and at first, I thought finding another role would be easy.
‘Once I started applying, I quickly realised it wasn’t. Some roles go through multiple stages, and then you might not get the job – or hear anything at all.’
Nathan McAllister set up the Hurdle community to help other job seekers
McAllister set up Hurdle, a community for people facing career change, burnout and redundancy, aimed at helping each other through the job application process.
He added: ‘Job hunting is especially tough for younger workers. I left university in 2023 and was competing with people whose entry-level roles had been delayed during Covid, which put me at an immediate disadvantage because they often had more experience in the workplace.
‘I can understand why businesses struggle too – I spoke to a company recently that received 4,500 applications for a single role, with many applicants not even matching the criteria of the role itself.
‘But for job seekers, ghost jobs and confusing processes make the market feel impersonal and demoralising. It’s exactly why so many people give up looking for a new role altogether.’
He said: ‘Look out for roles that keep being reposted, or ones shared by recruiters because they often post the same job every single day where they are often collecting your data. Other things to look for is the date that the job is posted (longer than a week old, you probably won’t hear back). These patterns don’t guarantee it’s a ghost job, but they’re a warning sign.’
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