Is America Facing An Unusual Ghost Job Plague Amidst An Already Feeble Economy

America’s labor market looks busy on the surface. Job boards are full, openings remain elevated, and hiring portals refresh daily. But beneath that activity sits a growing, distorted reality: job roles are being advertised publicly despite no real intent to hire.  Currently, 27.4% of online job postings qualify as ghost jobs as per the Entrepreneur. These job postings are dubious to say the least, considering the fact that they are already filled, indefinitely on hold or never meant to be filled in the first place. That figure alone is substantial enough to inflate perceptions of labor demand, especially against the backdrop of an economic momentum that is already fragile.  The mismatch shows up clearly in federal hiring data. In August 2025, the U.S. recorded 7.2 million job openings, but employers made only 5.1 million hires that same month leaving more than 2.1 million openings without a corresponding hire. While not every unfilled opening is a ghost job, the scale of the gap suggests that a significant portion of postings may exist largely on paper. 

The persistence of ghost jobs becomes even more concerning when placed alongside stalled hiring trends. CNBC notes that in late 2025, job postings remained elevated even as hiring momentum flattened, adding “another layer of uncertainty” to an already weak jobs picture. In other words, the signal of open roles and the outcome of actual employment are drifting further apart. The numbers become more harrowing when the hiring momentum is examined over the course of time. The widening gulf between openings and hires has persisted at a rate of 28.4% in 2025 as per the JOLTS data, meaning millions of posted roles each month never result in a hire. This is not a one-off statistical quirk; it is a sustained pattern.  

Employer behavior helps explain why. Hiring experts cited by The Interview Guys note that nearly one in three employers admits to posting fake listings with no intention of hiring, often to build resume pipelines, test compensation levels, or project growth externally even as 45% of HR professionals say they post ghost jobs regularly, and another 48% do so occasionally, turning a fringe tactic into a normalized hiring strategy.  Taken together, the evidence suggests ghost jobs aren’t a statistical fluke. They are a structural feature of a labor market that looks active, feels stagnant, and is increasingly difficult to read. In an already feeble economy, that distortion matters because when job openings stop meaning jobs, the data stops telling the truth.