\n<\/p>\n
You send off your r\u00e9sum\u00e9, wait for a reply and get nothing. Weeks later, the company is still advertising for the same job.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy to wonder what went wrong with your application, but the company might not have been hiring at all. That job you applied for might not exist.<\/p>\n
\u201cGhost jobs\u201d look like real opportunities, but the companies posting them have no intention of hiring for the roles. AI career tool Kickresume<\/a> recently conducted an analysis<\/a> of 96,902 job postings on Indeed in search of ghost jobs.<\/p>\n Kickresume looked for three red flags: listings that had been live for more than 30 days, identical ads posted again and calls for \u201curgent hiring\u201d with no application deadline. The analysis covered six fields: technology, finance, recruitment, marketing, healthcare and business.<\/p>\n In the U.S., more than a third of job listings, or 36%, had been sitting online for at least 30 days. The share was even higher in tech, where 43% of postings had passed the one-month mark. That doesn\u2019t necessarily mean those jobs were fake, but it does indicate that applicants should do more digging before applying for the role. <\/p>\n The other two red flags barely showed up. Exact copies of previously posted listings accounted for just 0.1% of ads, as did postings that promised \u201curgent hiring\u201d without giving applicants a deadline. Of the three signals the study examined, older listings were by far the most common.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a nice surprise to see that exact reposts and adverts that don\u2019t have a closing date but specify \u201curgent hiring\u201d were both rare,\u201d Peter Duris, CEO and Co-founder of Kickresume, said in a statement. \u201cThese are two key warning signs that a job may not be genuine.\u201d<\/p>\n Why advertise a job that isn\u2019t available? Sometimes, employers collect r\u00e9sum\u00e9s for future openings or use listings to see how low of a salary they can offer while still attracting applicants, Kickresume noted.<\/p>\n Other companies want to appear to be growing their headcount to impress investors and competitors.\u00a0A posting can also be a formality. The company has to advertise for a role even though they intend to make an internal hire. <\/p>\n However, not every misleading listing is intentional. Hiring plans can fall apart when budgets change, and filled positions sometimes stay online simply because no one remembered to take the advertisement down.\u00a0<\/p>\n Kickresume notes that an older listing that has been online for weeks isn\u2019t necessarily automatically a ghost job.\u00a0<\/p>\n Still, the company urges applicants to take a look at the employer\u2019s careers page for the job before sending in their r\u00e9sum\u00e9s. If they can\u2019t find the opening there, that\u2019s another reason to question if the company is actively hiring for the position.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYou can also contact the hiring manager to express your interest and ask if they\u2019re still looking,\u201d Duris said. \u201cDon\u2019t waste your time applying for a role that\u2019s already been filled, or worse, was never real in the first place!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n You send off your r\u00e9sum\u00e9, wait for a reply and get nothing. Weeks later, the company is still advertising for the same job.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s easy to wonder what went wrong with your application, but the company might not have been hiring at all. That job you applied for might not exist.<\/p>\n \u201cGhost jobs\u201d look like real opportunities, but the companies posting them have no intention of hiring for the roles. AI career tool Kickresume<\/a> recently conducted an analysis<\/a> of 96,902 job postings on Indeed in search of ghost jobs.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\nWhy ghost jobs exist<\/h2>\n
What to do about older listings<\/h2>\n
Key Takeaways<\/h2>\n
\n