Ghost jobs, scam listings, pipeline plays: Why is LinkedIn full of postings that go nowhere?

💼 Why are there so many job postings on LinkedIn that seem fake? Ask a recruiter who benefits when a job posting sits open with no one behind it, and the answer is almost always the same: no one. We put that question to two talent acquisition specialists at two different Egyptian companies. Both gave close to the same answer.

In numbers: Some 40% of hiring managers say their company posted a fake job listing in the past year, and 30% had one live at the time they were asked, according to a Resume Builder survey of 1,641 hiring managers. Seven in 10 of those listings ran on LinkedIn. The idea to post them, respondents said, came from HR, senior management, or executives, never framed as one person’s call — a pattern that our own reporting kept running into: everyone can describe the practice. Almost no one will own it.

Not all fakes are created equal

“Fake job posting” covers at least three different things, and they’re not equally deceptive. A ghost job is a live, real-looking listing a company has no near-term intent to fill, posted to look like it’s hiring, to bank résumés, or, as Anthony Guanio — a recruiter who has written publicly about the practice — argues, to keep engagement and follower numbers up on the recruiter’s own page.

A scam posting is simpler (and worse): There’s no employer at all, just someone harvesting CVs, personal information, or bank details. And a fair amount of what looks like a ghost job from the outside is neither — it’s a posting caught in a lag that has a legitimate business reason behind it.

Nada Maher, a talent management supervisor, gave us the clearest example of the third category. Her company sometimes recruits internally and externally for the same role at once to avoid losing time. If an internal candidate is picked, she says, “the original vacancy is filled internally, but this usually creates a new vacancy in the employee’s previous position” — so the external posting wasn’t fake; it just outlived its initial purpose.

The data (or lack thereof)

Beyond Resume Builder’s survey, most of the widely repeated numbers on this topic don’t hold up to a source check. A “27.4% of LinkedIn listings are ghost jobs” figure and an “81% of recruiters admit posting them” figure both circulate across dozens of career-advice blogs, but could not be traced to a solid report with a stated methodology. The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) job-scam numbers are a different, verified story: reports of job and employment-agency scams tripled between 2020 and 2024, and reported losses rose from USD 90 mn to USD 501 mn in that time, per the FTC.

Blame the pipeline, not the plan

Ask why a company would keep a dead listing up, and the honest answer — when we got one — pointed to volume, not deception. “We had hiring needs on a weekly basis, and it was based on quantity, not quality,” a recruitment professional tells EnterpriseAM, describing a past role in telecoms. She says the same was true in construction for on-site roles filled continuously rather than once. At her current employer, by contrast, a requisition opens only once fully approved and closes the moment an accepted offer comes back — everyone else in the pipeline gets a rejection email the same day, she adds.

Both recruiters we spoke with independently named the same exception: agencies. A freelance recruiter or agency fielding recurring requests for similar roles from different clients has a real reason to keep a pipeline warm: “as long as candidates are not misled about the nature or timing of the [window],” Maher says. Our second recruitment source drew the same line by function rather than employer type: a posting she’d hold open between sending an offer and getting an acceptance is operational; a posting held open with no offer in motion, no role, and no plan is not.

Asked directly who benefits from a posting staying live once there’s no real intent to hire, neither recruiter could name anyone. “No one for sure,” Maher says. The second source’s answer was narrower but the same in substance: only the recruiter, and only if pipeline-building was the explicit goal — otherwise, nobody.

A slower market, a bigger haystack

None of this is new, but the conditions around it have gotten sharper. Long-term unemployment in the US — people out of work six months or more — is at its highest level since 2022, and hiring has slowed to roughly 29k jobs added a month over the summer, NBC News reports, citing government data. A slower market means more applicants chasing fewer real openings.

The scam side of things

A ghost job at least has a real company behind it. A scam posting doesn’t — and it’s the more dangerous of the two. Criminal actors, not employers, are behind a wave of listings and recruiter impersonations sophisticated enough to be “nearly indistinguishable from legitimate listings,” according to an NBC News investigation that traced some of the activity to organized crime networks abroad. The FTC’s numbers back up the trend: job-scam losses rose sixfold between 2020 and 2024.

The signs are more mechanical than a ghost job’s, and easier to check. Watch for a poster with no company website or business email domain, a listing pushed as a regular post rather than through LinkedIn’s actual Jobs product, and any request to move the conversation off-platform before a formal offer exists — three flags Mohamed Soufan, a cybersecurity-focused LinkedIn contributor, lays out in detail.

LinkedIn itself began requiring verified workplace emails for recruiter and executive titles in September 2025, then extended that verification to job posts directly — the clearest sign yet that the platform sees this, correctly, as a distinct and more urgent problem than the ghost-job question above.

A system fix

The clearest internal fix our sources described wasn’t a new law or a LinkedIn policy — it was a system. Maher’s company runs requisitions through an applicant tracking system that closes a posting automatically once an offer is accepted, with unplaced qualified candidates rolled into a retained pool rather than left hanging on a dead listing. Yet these ambiguous listings persist both globally and in Om El Donia — some malicious, others simply a standard business practice.