Ghost jobs, stale postings and outright scams

A meaningful share of live postings are not being actively filled — the role is on hold, the budget was pulled, an internal candidate is already lined up, or the listing is stale. It is not personal, and there is no way to tell from the posting alone. What you can do is stop treating the apply button as your main channel.

Why a real company posts a job it is not filling

• The requisition is frozen but the posting is not. Budget was cut after approval and nobody took the listing down.
• An internal candidate is already chosen. Many companies are required by policy to post publicly anyway.
• Pipeline building. Always-on listings for roles the company hires continuously, which will sit open for a year.
• It was filled and never closed. Extremely common on aggregator sites, which re-scrape and re-date old listings.
• Signalling. A company that looks like it is growing. Rarer than the internet believes, but real.

None of these are visible from the outside, and none of them are a verdict on your resume. This matters because the natural inference from forty applications and no replies is that the document is broken — and it is only one of five explanations.

Weak signals a posting is stale

Not proof. Worth ten seconds each:

• Reposted repeatedly. The same role listed “3 days ago” every month. Check the company’s own careers page, which usually carries the true original date.
• Live for 60+ days at a company that is not huge.
• No named hiring manager or team, and a description that could be any company.
• A salary band far above or below everything comparable.
• Only on aggregators, absent from the company site. This one is closer to real evidence than the others.

Apply anyway if the role is right — it costs you ten minutes. Just do not build a week around it, and never let a stale listing be the only thing you did with a company you actually want.

Now the fraud half

Distinct problem, same search term, and this one takes money from people. Job scams follow a small number of scripts.

Stop immediately if any of these happen. There is no legitimate version:

• You are asked to pay. Registration, training, placement fee, security deposit, a “refundable” anything. Employers pay you. This includes agencies, which are paid by the employer.
• You are asked to buy equipment from a specified vendor, usually with a cheque you are told to deposit first. The cheque bounces after your payment clears.
• Bank details, PAN, Aadhaar or an ID scan before an offer. Payroll onboarding happens after a signed offer, through a named system.
• An offer with no interview, or after fifteen minutes on a chat app.
• The whole process on WhatsApp or Telegram, from a free email address, from a company whose careers page does not list the role.
• You are asked to receive and forward money. This is money laundering and the criminal exposure is yours.

One check catches nearly all of it: find the recruiter on the company’s own site or LinkedIn and contact them through an address you found yourself, not one they gave you. Scammers imitate real companies, so a real company name proves nothing.

What to do instead of more applications

The apply button is the most crowded and least informative channel there is. The alternatives are not secrets, they are just more work:

• Referrals — convert several times better than a cold application.
• A direct note to the hiring manager — low response rate, but the responses are real people.
• Applying where the listing originates rather than three aggregators downstream of it.

Where this site fits

Honestly, a ghost job is the one problem no resume fixes, and it is worth naming because the industry — ours included — benefits from you believing every silence is a document problem. Check the document once with the free checker. If it is clean, believe it, and spend the week on channels instead.