Ghost Job Detector: Is This Job Real?

Get a ghost risk score (0–100) with plain reasons for every job ad on Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby job boards.

A ghost job is a job ad with no real plan to hire: left open for months or years, reposted again and again, or kept online "just in case". In Q2 2026 about 1 in 5 job ads on Greenhouse clients' boards showed no hiring activity (WSJ). Ontario banned them in January 2026, and several US states are working on rules.

This Actor tells you, per job, how likely it is to be a ghost job and why.

Example result

Risk	Level	Company	Job	Why
75	high	ExampleCorp	Senior Data Engineer	Same role open 164 days (this ad posted 5 days ago); Reposted 2 times with a new ID; Company's openings barely changed in 90 days
60	high	ExampleCorp	Frontend Engineer	Open 1,012 days (more than 2 years)
0	low	ExampleCorp	Account Executive	No ghost signals found

Every row also has the official job link, the posting date, days open, the number of reposts, and a disclaimer.

How the score works

Simple, transparent rules, no black box:

Signal	Points
Open more than 60 / 90 / 180 days	+20 / +30 / +40
Open more than 1 year / 2 years	+50 / +60
Reposted with a new ID (same requisition number, or same title + location)	+15 per repost, max +30
Old ad recently "refreshed" (Greenhouse; not counted when the company updated its whole board on one day)	+5
Title says talent pool, general or open application	+15
The company's openings barely changed in 90 days	+15

Score is capped at 100. 0–29 low, 30–59 unclear, 60–100 high.

Why reposts count: a reposted ad looks brand new on job sites. We keep a daily history of every tracked board, so we see when the same role disappears and comes back with a new ID, and we count the days from the first time we saw the role.

How to use it

• Check specific companies: paste their job board links, for example https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/vercel, https://jobs.lever.co/company or https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/company. You get all their jobs.
• Get the riskiest jobs across all tracked companies: leave the boards empty and set Minimum ghost risk to 60. You get at most 3 jobs per company (change this with Maximum jobs per company).
• Filter by job title or location (for example engineer, London, Remote).
• Talent pools ("Don't see a role for you?", "General application") are left out by default, because the title already says they are not a real opening. Switch on Include talent pools to get them.

Boards we don't track yet are read live (days open and refreshed signals work immediately) and are added to our daily history, so their repost signals build up over time.

Who uses it

• Job boards and aggregators: hide stale or ghost listings.
• Job-seeker apps and AI job agents: only apply to real jobs.
• Sales and recruiting teams: a real hire usually means a real budget.
• Researchers and journalists: ghost-job numbers per company or sector.
• HR teams: check how your own ads look from the outside.

Pricing

You pay per job returned (see the price on this page). Use Maximum jobs and Minimum ghost risk to control what you pay. Jobs that are filtered out cost nothing.

Data and privacy

• Only job ads that companies publish themselves, read through the official public job-board APIs of Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby, within their robots.txt rules and at a polite rate.
• No personal data: no recruiter names, no emails, nothing about applicants.
• History started on 12 October 2026 and grows every day. The historyDays field shows how much history a board has.

Good to know

• This is a risk estimate from public signals, not proof that a job is fake. Some roles are legitimately always open (for example, large sales or support teams). Use the reasons, not just the number.
• Lever and Ashby don't show "last updated", so the "refreshed" signal only works for Greenhouse.
• Repost and company signals need history. Boards we started tracking recently mostly score on days open.

Output fields

ghostRisk, riskLevel, reasons, reasonsText, company, board, ats, jobId, title, location, department, postedAt, firstSeenByClock, daysOpen, roleDaysOpen, reposts, refreshed, evergreen, historyDays, source (history or live), url, checkedAt, disclaimer.