GHOST JOBS AND THE EROSION OF TRUST
At some point, many candidates started asking the same question after applying for jobs online: “Was this opportunity real?”
Over the past few years, the rise of “ghost jobs” has quietly become one of the most discussed and frustrating realities of the modern hiring market.
Ghost jobs are generally jobs that are publicly advertised even when there is no immediate intention to fill them or they have unclear hiring activity.
This can happen in different ways. Sometimes the role has already been filled internally. Sometimes the job posting simply stays online for months without movement.
In other cases, companies use postings to collect CVs, build talent pipelines for the future, or create the impression of growth and expansion during uncertain periods.
There are also situations where the role itself is real, but hiring priorities change internally before the process moves forward.
Some reports and commentators also claim that many companies keep postings active to benchmark salaries, reassure overworked employees, or simply keep future hiring options open during uncertain periods.
For candidates, however, the experience often feels the same: applying to opportunities that may never truly lead anywhere.
THE RISE OF GHOST JOBS
Over the past few years, the number of reported ghost jobs increased in an unprecedented manner. Several international reports and surveys now suggest that the practice is far more common than many candidates initially assumed.
In a 2025 Wall Street Journal article discussing the rise of ghost jobs, ResumeBuilder.com reported that 39% of hiring managers said their company posted “fake job listings” in 2024 alone.
The Guardian reported similar findings in 2024, reflecting growing concern around hiring transparency, candidate experience, and trust in recruitment systems. The question was no longer whether ghost jobs existed, but why companies consistently posted them.
WHEN APPLYING STARTS FEELING POINTLESS
Candidate experience does not start at the interview stage. It starts the moment a person decides whether an opportunity feels real, trustworthy, and worth emotional investment.
For most candidates, applying for a job takes time, emotional energy, attention, and hope. People adjust their CVs, write tailored applications, rebrand their LinkedIn profiles, study for interviews, research companies, and mentally start imagining what might happen next.
Now, before they hit the ‘Apply’ button, candidates are asking, “Is this job real?”
We are already seeing how the hiring experience is slowly changing from optimism to uncertainty and pessimism with a side of “job-search and emotional fatigue”.
Complete silence and automated rejection emails are now the most anticipated outcomes. Candidates gradually stop trusting the hiring process itself. Many begin feeling invisible, exhausted, and disengaged from the job market.
Companies, human resources, and job platforms are also not immune. By following this trend, they risk losing credibility, destroying years of work to build their employer-of-choice branding, and eroding trust in recruitment and hiring systems altogether.
PRESERVING TRUST IN MODERN HIRING
Yet, in the era of uncertainty, economic instability, and security threats, how can we solve this dilemma?
The solution is not to remove the uncertainty, obviously, but to reduce the invisible uncertainty. A shift to transparency, where candidates have more visibility on where they stand.
A simple differentiation of the job posting could make strides in this case. Actively hiring, building pipelines, hiring paused, labels of an advertisement that changes everything a candidate’s perception of the job.
Labelling jobs increases trust and shows care and honesty of the employer, increasing trust and building brand love.
WHEN CANDIDATES START ADAPTING
But if uncertainty is becoming part of modern hiring, how are candidates adapting to it? Many are slowly changing the way they approach the job market altogether.
Candidates now understand that not every recruitment cycle is intended for immediate hiring. Some processes are exploratory, others are perhaps future-oriented, while some may already be paused internally.
As a result, people are carefully looking for signals like recent posting dates, recruiter activity, employer responsiveness, interview movement, and even the consistency of communication throughout the process.
In many ways, candidates are learning the language of hiring.
At the same time, repeated exposure to uncertainty is also changing the emotional relationship people have with job searching.
Many candidates are becoming more cautious about how much emotional energy they invest in their job search. Not because they care less, but because prolonged silence, uncertainty, and inactive processes can slowly affect confidence, motivation, and emotional wellbeing.
The challenge is no longer about finding opportunities, but about learning how to navigate uncertainty without becoming emotionally consumed by it.
RE-HUMANISING HIRING IN AN AUTOMATED ERA
Can HR do anything? Absolutely!
HR sits at the crossroads between organisational uncertainty and human clarity. In many ways, it is the function most responsible for preserving transparency in an complex hiring environment. This means removing inactive jobs, improving communication with candidates, reducing ambiguity, and creating clear distinct labelling in their job advertising.
And most importantly, HR is expected to re-humanise hiring, even as automation becomes more common. Automated communication needs to feel more human, transparent, and timely. Faster updates, clearer expectations, and more thoughtful communication can reduce the emotional uncertainty candidates experience throughout the process.
Because even HR professionals were once candidates themselves.
Strategically, HR should also aim to shift from reactive to proactive hiring models with more intentional workforce planning, clearer hiring governance, and stronger ethical recruitment standards.
It is worth noting that AI can deepen the problem, it has the potential to do the complete opposite.
Yet, if used responsibly, AI integration could provide solutions to communicate hiring status more clearly, identify inactive recruitment pipelines, improve response timelines, explain delays, and provide more consistent candidate updates throughout the hiring journey.
The future of recruitment will not depend only on speed, automation, or scalability. It will depend on whether organisations can preserve trust inside increasingly uncertain hiring systems.
SOURCES
Resume Builder | “4 in 10 Companies Have Posted a Fake Job Listing This Year.” | 2024
The Wall Street Journal | “Fake Job Postings Are Becoming a Real Problem.” | 2025
The Guardian | “Ghost Jobs: Why Do 40% of Companies Advertise Positions That Don’t Exist?” | 2024
Forbes | “The Rise of Ghost Jobs.” | 2024