In February, Indian news agency ANI published a 90-second YouTube Short asking a question a lot of job seekers already suspected: are some of those job postings actually fake?
The answer, as it turns out, is yes — and the scale is larger than most people realize.
Research from MyPerfectResume found that 81% of recruiters say their employer posts ghost jobs — positions advertised with no near-term intention of hiring. The reasons vary: roughly 38% of recruiters said it’s to maintain a presence on job boards during hiring freezes, 36% to gauge the effectiveness of their postings, and 26% to gather intelligence on the job market. A smaller but notable share admitted the goal is to make current employees feel replaceable.
For job seekers, this is not a minor inconvenience. It’s a structural problem that distorts the entire process.
The Silence Has a Name
Ghosting — submitting an application and hearing nothing — has become so common that researchers are now tracking it as a trend. A March 2026 Fortune report found that more than half of job seekers had been ghosted by an employer in the past year, reaching a three-year high. The piece notes that hiring processes “haven’t caught up” to a world where AI tools make it trivially easy to send out hundreds of applications.
That’s partly the point. AI has accelerated both sides of the equation. Job seekers use it to apply to more positions faster. Employers use it to screen the resulting flood of applications — or to simply let the posting sit and collect resumes for future use. The result, according to a Greenhouse report cited by HR Dive, is something researchers are calling an “AI doom loop”: automation on one side prompting automation on the other, with actual human connection increasingly absent from what is supposed to be a human transaction.
What the Data Actually Shows
A 2026 survey of 1,066 U.S. job seekers by Enhancv found that 50.5% had received at least one rejection in the past year with no human feedback whatsoever. Of that group, nearly two-thirds believed an algorithm made the decision. Only 9.7% of the full sample said an employer had clearly disclosed that AI was involved in the process.
Meanwhile, Resume Genius data published in April 2026 found that 67% of job seekers had encountered what they believed were ghost job postings, and that the biggest mental health stressors in job searching were rejections (47%), not hearing back from employers (46%), and financial pressure (45%).
The numbers are U.S.-focused, but the dynamics are not. Ghost jobs, AI screening, and recruiter silence are features of any hiring market that relies heavily on global job boards — which is most of them.
What You Can Do About It
The honest answer is that you can’t fully opt out of a broken system. But you can reduce the amount of time you spend inside it.
A few things that hold up across the evidence:
Apply strategically, not volumetrically. Mass applying via AI tools feeds the exact doom loop described above. A smaller number of targeted, customized applications tends to outperform hundreds of generic ones, particularly for roles above entry level.
Treat the posting date as a signal. Job listings more than 30 days old with no movement are more likely to be ghost positions. Many job boards now allow filtering by date posted — use it.
Find a person, not just a posting. Before applying to any role you’re serious about, try to identify someone at the company — a recruiter, a hiring manager, a team member — and make contact through LinkedIn or a direct email. Even a brief exchange before you apply changes the dynamics. Applications with internal referrals or prior contact get prioritized.
Ask directly during interviews. If you reach an interview stage, it’s reasonable to ask: “Is this role actively being hired for, and what does your timeline look like?” A company that can’t answer that question clearly is telling you something.
The Smita Prakash clip is short, but it captures something the statistics confirm: the frustration job seekers are feeling is not a personal failure. It’s a rational response to a process that has become, in many cases, genuinely opaque. Understanding that is the first step toward navigating it more efficiently.
Statistics in this post are linked to primary sources at time of publication. If you find a broken link, let us know.