Are all your job applications failing? It might not be you, but ghost listings and résumé black holes
For years, job seekers have been taught to internalise rejection. No callback? Fix the résumé. No interview? Improve the pitch. Silence? Try harder. But this familiar advice collapses under scrutiny. The modern job market is not just competitive, it is structurally misleading.According to new findings by LiftMyCV, a significant share of job listings that appear open and active are, in reality, dormant. These so-called ghost jobs create the illusion of opportunity while absorbing time, emotional energy, and confidence. The failure, in many cases, is not the candidate. It is the system.
What the data shows: The ghost job economy of 2026
LiftMyCV analysed 100,000 job IDs across LinkedIn, Indeed, and Greenhouse to understand how long roles stay live without meaningful activity. The results are stark. More than 40% of listings showed no evidence of human interaction for over 30 days, despite continuing to accept applications.In practical terms, nearly two out of every five jobs cluttering candidate feeds had effectively gone cold. No recruiter screening. No hiring manager review. No active decision-making.This aligns with broader public estimates that place ghost jobs at 30–36% of all postings. Employer surveys further suggest that roughly 40% of companies have listed roles they never fully intended to fill. At the same time, over 75% of résumés submitted through applicant tracking systems are filtered out before reaching a human reviewer.Together, these forces create what many candidates experience as a résumé black hole: effort goes in, nothing comes back.
What’s new in LiftMyCV’s findings
Most discussions around ghost jobs stop at frustration. LiftMyCV moves beyond anecdotes by measuring how long listings remain untouched while still appearing open. By comparing posting dates with human interaction signals, the analysis shows how opportunity decays quietly on major job boards.The insight is simple but powerful: not all listings deserve equal effort. Some roles show clear signs of active hiring, while others exist purely as digital residue. Treating every job post as real is no longer a rational strategy.
Why companies keep dead jobs online
Ghost jobs rarely begin as deception. They emerge when business reality changes faster than internal hiring processes. Budgets freeze. Teams restructure. Internal candidates are promoted. Yet listings remain live because no one is responsible for removing them.Automation worsens the problem. Posting a job across multiple platforms is effortless; closing it often requires manual approvals. As a result, dead roles spread faster than they are cleaned up.The other motivation is the pipeline construction. Most companies leave jobs vacant so as to receive resumes when necessary. Although this method is effective on paper, it transfers cost to the applicants, who spend time and effort submitting applications to non-existent jobs in any meaningful sense.This overtime sends trust erosion and contributes to disengagement throughout the talent market.
Recruitment as signalling rather than staffing
Another area of analysis that LiftMyCV identifies is a more strategic application of job postings. In other industries, in particular in industries that are sensitive to investors or those that are VC-funded, listings are, literally, a publicity measure, rather than a personnel strategy.An extensive careers page has the ability to project expansion, calm stakeholders, and hint at momentum even in periods of hiring slugs. To applicants, it translates that the apparent recruiting work does not necessarily indicate the growth of the headcount.What is produced is a labour market which appears to be hotter than it actually is, which implies that applicants are going after jobs they were not intended to turn into offers.
In the regions of the highest concentration of ghost jobs
The distribution of ghosts is uneven. The findings of the research carried out by LiftMyCV emphasize the elevated levels in the fields of government, healthcare, education, information technology, and finance, which are predetermined by the lengthy approval procedures and fluctuating budgets, as well as by numerous pauses in the recruitment processes.However, the retail, hospitality, and construction business would tend to exhibit a stronger correlation between postings and actual hires. Their functions are need-based and are associated with urgent staffing requirements.This is important to the job seekers. Knowing how the sector works might be used to prioritise effort and minimise burnout.
How to detect a ghost job
LiftMyCV is of the view that in seconds, candidates can filter risk by answering 3 simple questions: Is the listing proactively kept? Is the description clearly correspond to real current work?Does the narrative about hiring have broader behaviour that is supported by the company?Low intent is sometimes indicated by generic descriptions that are full of buzzwords, templates, and unrealistic skill requirements. So do those positions that can be rejuvenated with slight modifications, but no actual recruitments.Only posting dates cannot be relied upon. Numerous listings listed as new are just ghosts revived by robots and not new hiring plans.
Escaping the résumé black hole
Automation separates applicants and the decision-makers, even where the roles are real. The manual, scattershot applications are becoming extremely inefficient, with only 2-3 percent of applicants usually securing an interview.LiftMyCV indicates the increasing popularity of AI-driven job search engines that assist job seekers with better-quality listings and applications on a large scale. It is not a change of application, but of application itself, with precision, and attention to areas where human activity has been shown to exist.
