Some jobs follow you around the internet; others are nearly impossible to find. The difference isn’t quality — it’s whether the employer paid to advertise.

A generation ago, before online job search tools, the main way employers attracted candidates was by posting an ad in a newspaper, for a fee. And it was well understood that not every open job was advertised that way. Some jobs had a “help wanted” sign in the window. Some were promoted only through word of mouth, others by recruiting directly from colleges and vocational schools.

Nobody found this sinister. It was just how the market worked, and job seekers knew to look in more than one place.

The difference is that in 1985, you knew the newspaper wasn’t the whole market. Today, most job seekers incorrectly assume that the big, mainstream job boards include all the jobs that are posted online.

Job seekers who find and apply to off-board jobs are working from a bigger map and standing in a shorter line. They see openings that never appear on the big job boards, and the openings they find typically draw fewer applicants and get screened less aggressively by automated filters. Jobs that employers aggressively promote get access to a lot of candidates, but they tend to attract a lot more unqualified applications, too, so they have a big job to do filtering to a short list, and it’s not feasible to have a human review all those applications. But when a job gets only a dozen applicants, and half of them are well-qualified, it is perfectly feasible for a recruiter or hiring manager to review every résumé. If you are one of those applicants, and you’re qualified, your résumé actually gets evaluated on its merits. A key part of our mission at HiringCafe is to help job seekers reach the off-board job market and find better opportunities there.

To explain why off-board jobs exist, it helps to understand how a job becomes visible in the first place.

A job board is an advertising business, and the job listings in search results are an ad product. Some job boards, including Indeed and Glassdoor, will surface certain organic, non-sponsored jobs in their search results, but they always rank lower than the sponsored jobs (even if they are more relevant). From the job board’s perspective, making those organic jobs harder to find means they get fewer applicants, which encourages employers to pay for job ads, which is good for business. But from a job seeker’s perspective, having the most relevant jobs demoted so that they can push sponsored jobs makes it easier to miss the right job.

When you search on a major job board, you are not seeing a neutral index of open jobs sorted by relevance to you. Sponsored jobs rank higher, and stay higher up in the search results as they age, while non-sponsored jobs start out ranking lower, and disappear quickly over time. The results you see on a mainstream job board are shaped substantially by who paid, how much, and how recently.

Once you understand that, the job market resolves into five tiers of visibility.

The employer is actively spending to put this listing in front of as many people as possible. It’s at the top of search results, in job alert emails, in retargeted ads that follow you around the web, and probably in your feed three times this week.

Big ad budgets mean big applicant pools. A tier 1 posting for a desirable role can pull hundreds of applications in its first week. Your résumé enters a stack so large that no human will read most of it, which means the first cut has to be automated, which means your fate is decided by a keyword parser and a set of knockout questions before anyone knows you exist.

High visibility is not the same as high opportunity. For you, it’s often the opposite.

The employer is paying, but on a small budget, or the budget ran out, or the campaign targets a narrow geography. The listing surfaces sometimes, for some searches, for some people. Competition is real but not overwhelming.

The employer sends a feed of its openings to the job boards — usually automatically, straight out of its applicant tracking system — but doesn’t pay to promote them. The jobs are on the board and technically searchable. They’re just buried, ranking below every sponsored listing and behind whatever went up more recently.

This is the interesting one, and the one that we’ve made central to our vision at HiringCafe.

The job is public. It’s live on the employer’s careers page, it’s accepting applications, and anyone who lands on that page can apply today. But it isn’t in any feed sent to the major job boards. Nobody at the company pushed it out to the world.

Off-board jobs also arise at very small businesses that have no applicant tracking system, and just post jobs on their own website. These jobs are on the web, but they are hard to find. And pay-to-play job boards have very little incentive to find and index these jobs, since they won’t be sponsored anyway. Job sites can’t find these jobs just by ingesting feeds. We need to crawl the web to find them, in much the same way Google crawls to find new web pages.

To a job seeker using ordinary tools, an off-board job is effectively invisible, not because the job is actually secret, but because the standard tools don’t reach it. You could only find it by knowing the company existed, guessing they might be hiring, navigating to their careers page, and looking.

It’s also, from a job seeker’s perspective, the best-value inventory in the entire market, for reasons we’ll get to.

Some jobs really aren’t posted anywhere.

A company staffing a confidential initiative doesn’t want competitors reading the job descriptions. A board of directors quietly replacing an executive can’t post the role before the incumbent’s resignation is public. Some senior searches run entirely through retained headhunters, by design.

These roles get filled through outbound recruiting, not inbound applications. No job site has them, including HiringCafe — not because we can’t find them, but because they don’t exist as public postings. We strive to index every job opening that’s published online, but we can’t index a job that doesn’t have a job description or “Apply” page on the employer’s website, let alone find it. It is actually hidden.

It sounds strange at first. Why would an employer with a real opening not distribute it?

The economics: why crowded is bad for you

The supply and demand story here is unusually clean. A job opening is one unit of supply. Every applicant is a unit of demand. Anything that increases the number of people who see a posting increases demand against fixed supply, and your individual odds fall accordingly.

Sponsorship is, quite literally, a mechanism for increasing the number of competitors you face.

That’s the average across all postings. On a heavily sponsored listing for a desirable role, the number of applicants can be in the thousands. Two things happen to you when the pile gets that deep, and both are bad.

Now consider the same role, off-board. Same company, same work, same salary, but instead of 400 applicants there are 12, because the only people who found it were people who went looking on the careers page, or who got a tip about the opening through word-of-mouth. At 12 applications, a human reads all of them, including yours.

A ghost job is a posting that isn’t attached to a hiring decision anyone intends to make. And almost every reason to post one requires an audience:

The one exception is the zombie posting — a filled role nobody took down. Those happen anywhere, including on careers pages, which is why you should assess the actual freshness of any listing you find, to see how long it’s been hanging around.

Our approach to job discovery starts from the employer’s careers page rather than from a feed someone sends us. It takes more work to do it this way, but it means that HiringCafe can give visibility to jobs that other job boards never see. Our inventory isn’t limited to what employers chose to syndicate.

If a company has a real, live opening on its own site, we can find it, whether or not anyone paid to advertise it, and whether or not it was ever advertised on a single job board. As a result, when you search on HiringCafe:

We should be honest about the shape of that last advantage. It’s a distribution gap, and distribution gaps narrow. The more people who use us, the more applicants those off-board jobs will get. We’re not going to pretend otherwise. But the gap is wide right now, and the difference between being applicant 12 and applicant 400 is the difference between being vetted by a human and being parsed by a machine.

We estimated that 20-40% of live job postings are off-board. We want to be clear about what kind of estimate that is.

It comes from comparing the openings we find on employer careers pages against what appears in the syndicated feed ecosystem. It’s a range rather than a single figure because the answer moves a lot depending on industry, company size, geography, seniority, and seasonality. It’s much higher in local government and healthcare than in tech, and higher for small employers than large ones. And there’s no authoritative public dataset to check it against, which is itself the problem: Nobody is counting the jobs the job boards don’t have, because the job boards are the ones doing the counting.

Treat it as an informed estimate from people who look at this inventory every day, not a published statistic.

The help-wanted sign in the window was never a trick. It was just a job that hadn’t been advertised, hanging there for whoever walked by. The off-board job market is the same thing at internet scale: millions of real openings, publicly posted, accepting applications right now, invisible only because no money was spent making them visible.

What you see when you open a job board isn’t the labor market. It’s the portion of the labor market someone paid to show you, sorted by how much they paid.

What you see on HiringCafe is the result of our efforts to create the most complete inventory of US job openings on the web. And when a job ranks highly on HiringCafe, it’s not because it was sponsored, but rather because it best matched your job search and your qualifications.

The Off-Board Job Market - HiringCafe

The Off-Board Job Market

Learn the ghost-busting strategies we use at HiringCafe to eliminate ghost jobs, so you don't waste your time applying to fake job postings.

This was one of the reasons we created HiringCafe, because we heard from our friends and colleagues about the ghost job epidemic and the real-life impact it’s having on people. People are right to be angry about this, and people searching for jobs deserve to know if a job they’re considering is actually a real opening that is going to be filled in the near future.

To avoid this problem, you should know what to look out for, and you should only use a job search tool that has systems and policies in place to filter out ghost jobs.

A company that’s genuinely hiring but slow to respond to your application is not running a ghost job. Sometimes there are logistical, budgetary, or personnel issues that make the hiring process slow, which can be annoying for job seekers, but isn’t really a dishonest practice.

Collecting resumes now for future candidate pipeline

The company is not hiring now, but they expect they might experience normal employee turnover in the future, and having people pre-apply for the possible future role gives the company a warm stack of résumés on file for if a position ever opens up. When you apply, you’re not a candidate, you’re inventory.

Zombie jobs that stay alive after they’re dead

Zombie jobs aren’t usually malicious, but they still waste your time.

Hiring theater: Pretending to be hiring, just for the appearance

You are not the audience for this posting. It’s just for show.

The process is real, but the outcome was decided before you ever clicked the job listing. They’re not looking for candidates, except that some law or policy requires them to make an effort to do so.

But the far more common version has nothing to do with immigration. It’s the role that’s already going to an internal candidate, but company policy, a collective bargaining agreement, or civil service rules requires the job be posted publicly for a certain period and open to outside applicants. So the job gets posted, but your application is probably never seriously considered, and after the required waiting period has elapsed, the internal candidate gets the job.

These policies were typically written to guarantee fairness and eliminate bias, but the process has been reduced to a formality. The cost of the formality is quietly transferred to job seekers, who put in the work to apply for nothing.

Why companies post ghost jobs, in their own words

The most damning evidence about ghost jobs doesn’t come from job seekers. It comes from the people posting them.

Go to r/recruitinghell or r/FightFakeJobs on Reddit and you’ll find the same confession in the wild, over and over: HR staff explaining to coworkers, to strangers, sometimes to their own disbelief, why their company keeps a req open for a job that does not exist.

None of these people think of themselves as running a scam. Wasting hours and hours of strangers’ time has been normalized into a routine HR practice, and until very recently, absolutely nothing happened to anyone who did it.

In the absence of government regulation, there is an opportunity for job search platforms to implement their own policies and practices to suppress ghost jobs or punish employers who post them. But when employers are paying the job boards to promote those ghost jobs, and when the ghost jobs help attract new users to the job board, the boards have a vested business interest in maintaining the status quo. A dead posting still draws in job seekers. It still shows up in job alert emails that drive job seekers back to the job board, and helps the job board attract traffic from search engines. It still generates ad revenue for the job board.

Worse still, all those frustrated job seekers who keep getting ghosted present a business opportunity for job boards, too. LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter both offer features that claim to enable job seekers to have their applications viewed with higher priority. “Top choice job”, available to LinkedIn premium customers, and ZipRecruiter’s free “Be seen first” both appeal to job seekers’ frustrations. If you’ve been ghosted for lots of the jobs you applied to, the idea that your resume could be prioritized for either a modest fee (LinkedIn) or a small extra task in the apply flow (ZipRecruiter) sounds appealing. But what’s the point of paying your way to the top of the stack if no one is seriously considering the applications anyway? The system is working for the employers, and working for the job boards, but is costing job seekers both time and money.

At HiringCafe, we don’t profit from ghost jobs, and we make a major effort to identify and remove them, which is the exact opposite of what the Texas AG has accused LinkedIn of doing.

Whatever tool you use for your job search, these tactics will help you identify and avoid ghost jobs.

Most of what we do to fight ghost jobs is built into our policies and practices, and doesn’t even require fancy machine learning or AI. We made three important decisions about what kinds of jobs we will list on our site.

1. We don’t take syndicated feeds from staffing agencies and résumé farms

One of the biggest sources of ghost jobs are staffing agencies, consultancies, and unscrupulous job aggregators that use fake job postings or expired jobs to attract job seekers and collect their info, either to get the job seeker subscribed to their job email programs, or to sell that information to employers in the future. These listings exist to harvest your résumé, your phone number, your work authorization status and your salary expectations, so that a recruiter has something to work with later. You are not actually using the product to get a job, and instead you are the product being sold to employers.

These agencies syndicate relentlessly, pushing the same listings to every board that will accept a feed, which is how one fictional opening becomes forty search results across the internet.

We don’t accept these feeds. If there’s a real job opening, we’ll find it directly from the employer.

2. The employer’s career page is the only source of truth

Before a job appears on HiringCafe, we confirm it’s live on the employer’s own careers site. In fact, we source the job details and the “Apply” page URL directly from the employer, not from a feed someone sent us. And we check the employer’s apply page for each job posting approximately every 4 hours to make sure the job is still live and accepting applicants. If the job comes down from the employer’s career page then it comes down from HiringCafe.

3. We keep the real posting date, and nobody gets to reset it

On the big job boards, “Posted today” means almost nothing. An employer or an agency can refresh a sponsored listing endlessly, and each refresh resets the clock, so a req that’s been rotting since last spring shows up in your feed looking brand new, or even show up in your job alert email among “today’s new job postings”. The staleness, which is the single most useful signal you have, gets laundered away.

We filter out 3-4% of all job postings based on these policies. These policies go beyond ghost jobs, eliminating other problem jobs as well.

Unfortunately, detecting ghost jobs is an imperfect science, especially because many of these jobs are intentionally deceptive. So, we collect feedback from users about their experience applying to jobs, and share that with the community. We don’t take a job off our site because a couple people reported being ghosted, but we do make that information available to our users, so you can set realistic expectations.

And you can use that information to filter out jobs that are suspected of being ghost jobs, which gives you more control over what jobs you see.

Just to be transparent, here’s a quick note about some of the numbers cited here. 124K is about 3-4% of our total inventory of jobs. We estimate that 50K of the jobs we filter out are ghost jobs, but this number is not verifiable, because we can’t tell for certain which of the filtered out jobs are copies of legitimate jobs vs genuinely fake jobs.

You should not have to become a forensic analyst to look for work.

Every hour spent decoding whether a job is real is an hour not spent preparing for the interview that’s actually worth having. The ghost-busting tactics above work, and you should use them. But in a more honest and transparent job market, you ideally shouldn’t need them. The burden of verifying that a job really exists should not be on the job seeker. It’s the platform’s job, and for twenty years the biggest platforms in the world have declined to do it because declining was free.

We built the ghost job elimination into the product because we think you should be able to open a job search tool and trust every listing on it. That shouldn’t be a radical feature, but the fact that it is tells you who the big job boards are most accountable to: Their shareholders and their employer customers, but not job seekers.

Insights from HiringCafe