Ghost Jobs Report, September 2026

How old the open postings are

Every dated open posting, by the time since the employer published it. The two right hand bands are what this report calls stale.

Under 30 days

45.1%260,305

By category

Hospitality postings sit the longest: 43.9% have been open more than 90 days, median 65 days. Healthcare turns over fastest at 19.7%.

By applicant tracking system

The system an employer posts through says a lot about how its postings age. Lever boards carry the largest stale share at 48.2%; Workday the smallest at 17.2%. Pinpoint, Personio, Y Combinator publish no posting date, so their age cannot be measured and is not guessed.

By country

The fifteen countries with the most open postings, by how their postings age and how often a salary is stated. The full thirty are in the CSV.

The employers with the most open postings

The twenty employers with the most postings open on their own careers site, and how many of those have been up more than 90 days. A long open posting is not proof of anything on its own: some roles are evergreen, some employers hire in volume all year. This table reports the rate and links every name to its postings so you can check them at the source. Employers appear above 50 open postings only.

Closures and reposts

88,895

postings removed from their employer’s site in the last 30 days

14.6% came down within a week of publishing and 30.8% within two.

24 days

median time from publishing to removal

Over postings that closed in the last 90 days. Ninety percent closed within 113 days. We have watched for 29 days, so the true medians can only be longer; this is a lower bound.

4.2%

of closed postings came back within 30 days

3,915 postings closed and the same employer published the same role again. A further 4,576 open postings were closed and reopened in place.

Definitions and method

Stale

A posting the employer’s own careers site has shown open for more than 90 days, counted from the date the employer published. This report never calls a single posting a ghost job. It reports rates.

Repost

A posting that closes and comes back within 30 days as a new posting for the same role at the same employer, matched on the normalized title and description.

Where the data comes from

Unlisted reads the public APIs of the applicant tracking systems employers post through, board by board, every few hours. Nothing is scraped from job boards and nothing is estimated. Every posting counted here was open on its employer’s site when the report was computed.

What it cannot say

Whether an employer that keeps a posting up is still interviewing, and how long the same postings stay on LinkedIn or Indeed after they leave the source. We only see the source. Closure times are bounded by how long we have been watching, and the report says so wherever it prints one.