A new dataset pairs a 1,000-person US job seeker survey with Bureau of Labor Statistics hiring records, Enhancv's 2026 Ghost Jobs Survey, (both drawn from the same window: January 2026, the most recent BLS data available when the survey was fielded). The survey shows performative hiring is deliberate, widespread, and increasingly expensive. It shapes how candidates behave, which roles actually get filled, and which brands people are still willing to buy from. Recruiters built their industry on matching real people to real vacancies. This is their problem first.
From forgotten listings to a deliberate strategy
The Congressional Research Service defines a ghost job as a posting "for a position that does not exist, or that employers are not planning to fill immediately." That definition covers two very different practices. Some listings are just clutter—nobody closed them after the role got filled, or a junior recruiter forgot to pull an old post off the board.
Performative hiring is something else. It's a listing built, staffed and run as if the role were real, right up until it isn't.
The numbers show the split. Of surveyed candidates who hit a fake listing, 64% caught on right after applying. A quarter weren't so lucky—25% got pulled into a screening call, a first-round interview, or further, before finding out the job never existed. Running an interview loop costs a recruiter's time and a hiring manager's calendar slot. Companies don't do that by accident.
They do it for reasons the survey and outside reporting both point to. Some employers are signalling growth to the board and investors. Some are benchmarking market salaries without ever intending to make an offer. Some are mining free strategy advice out of senior candidates mid-"interview." Others just want a visibly deep applicant pool, so current staff, and future hires, keep their salary expectations low. Ghosting has become a data-collection exercise with a job title stapled to it.
A market that's 25% smaller than the official numbers say
The scale here is already well documented. One widely cited analysis of LinkedIn postings put the ghost job rate at 27.4% of all current U.S. listings. What should worry anyone quoting labor-market health off the top-line numbers is what's sitting underneath that figure.
The latest BLS JOLTS release counted 7.4 million US job openings against 5.3 million actual hires. That gap alone says plenty of postings aren't converting. Enhancv's survey combines that gap with candidate-reported ghosting rates, sector by sector, and estimates that the job market candidates actually face is roughly 25% smaller than the headline vacancy count suggests.
Two sectors make the case. Information technology recorded 192,000 BLS openings against 102,000 hires, a 47% gap, with 85.7% of candidates in the sector reporting a ghost job encounter.
Professional and business services looked healthier on paper: 1.38 million openings, 1.02 million hires, a 26% gap. Yet 71.4% of candidates there still reported ghosting.
Marketing and advertising topped every sector surveyed, at 87.5%.
Sectors that are demonstrably filling roles are still running plenty of fake ones alongside them. That's not a shortage of genuine demand, but a parallel, low-cost hiring channel that looks identical to the real one from the outside.
Your strongest candidates are the ones walking away
If ghosting mostly hit entry-level applicants, the industry could shrug it off as noise. But it doesn't.
Professionals with eight or more years of experience are the single most targeted group: 51% say they've encountered a ghost job, well ahead of any other experience band. These are precisely the candidates every employer claims to be fighting over.
They're also the ones disengaging first. Among candidates who'd been ghosted, 24% said they'd significantly cut back how many jobs they apply to. Another 12% had abandoned a major job board entirely, calling it too "polluted" with fake listings to bother with.
That's a supply problem the industry is creating for itself. Every senior candidate who stops applying in good faith is one fewer qualified person in the pipeline the next time a role is genuinely open. Ghost jobs teach your best prospects to stop trusting job boards, and by extension, the recruiters posting on them.
The bill nobody budgeted for - brand and revenue
One more finding matters here, and it's a revenue problem before it's a recruitment one. Over 40% of surveyed candidates now avoid buying from companies they suspect of posting fake jobs, so a tactic meant to save a few thousand pounds in ad spend is probably costing the business real sales elsewhere.
There's a human cost too. Enhancv's survey found 37% of candidates who hit a ghost job reported out-of-pocket losses chasing it, from travel to interviews that never happened to paid test assignments for roles that didn't exist. Candidates in the lowest income bracket took the sharpest hit: 63% reported meaningful financial loss.
Trust is infrastructure. It's cheap to erode and expensive to rebuild. Once candidates stop applying in good faith, every future search gets slower and costs more to fill, genuine vacancies included. The "free" intelligence extracted from a fake interview stops looking free once you price in what it costs to win candidates back.
What honest hiring looks like in 2026
None of this means employers have to stop scoping roles ahead of budget approval. It means being honest about what they're doing. For recruiters and in-house teams who want to get ahead of the trust problem instead of getting caught in it, a few habits help:
- Close or clearly date-stamp reqs the moment a role is filled, instead of leaving them live "for pipeline."
- Audit "evergreen" ATS postings on a set schedule, and retire any listing nobody's actively screening against.
- Send an actual rejection, even a templated one, instead of letting candidates disappear into silence.
- Treat job-post honesty as an employer-brand asset worth marketing.
Over 40% of candidates are already screening companies out over suspected ghosting. In that market, transparency is the profitable choice, not the cautious one.
Conclusion
Performative hiring costs more than candidate goodwill. It shrinks the real applicant pool, drains revenue, and erodes the trust recruiters depend on to do their jobs. The market is starting to reward honesty. Recruiters who practice it should be the ones saying so.
