We Analyzed 52,000 Job Listings for Ghost Jobs. Your Odds Are Worse Than You Think.

ResearchMarch 9, 2026· 7 min read· Subspace

There's a stat floating around right now that the success rate on job applications has dropped to 0.4%. Not 4%. Zero point four.

We wanted to know why. So instead of speculating, we pointed our scoring engine at 52,398 real job listings across 1,778 companies and measured what's actually happening inside the hiring pipeline.

The short answer: a significant chunk of the jobs you're applying to aren't real opportunities. They're stale postings, evergreen funnels, or listings with signals that suggest no one is actively reviewing applications. And the data shows it's not evenly distributed — some companies are dramatically worse than others.

The Dataset

This isn't a survey. We scrape live job boards daily — Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever, SmartRecruiters, iCIMS, Workday, and others — and run every listing through a deterministic scoring engine that evaluates behavioral markers: posting age, description quality, salary transparency, reposting patterns, cross-platform consistency, and dozens of other signals.

Every job gets a ghost score (0-1 scale, higher = more concern) and a signal score measuring listing quality. The numbers below reflect the full pipeline as of March 2026.

One-Third of Listings Are Older Than 90 Days

This is the headline number. Of the 42,155 listings with a posted date:

| Age | Listings | % of Dated Jobs | |-----|----------|-----------------| | Older than 60 days | 16,717 | 39.7% | | Older than 90 days | 13,074 | 31.0% | | Older than 120 days | 10,329 | 24.5% |

Nearly 1 in 3 dated job listings has been sitting on a board for over three months. A quarter have been up for four months or longer.

Some of these are legitimate hard-to-fill roles. But at this scale, the simpler explanation is that a large number of companies are not actively managing their job boards. They post, they leave it up, and candidates keep applying into a queue that nobody is reading.

This is a structural problem, not an edge case.

4% of Jobs Show High Ghost Signals

Our engine flagged 2,102 listings (4.0% of all scored jobs) with a ghost score above 0.6 — the threshold where multiple independent signals align to suggest the listing is unlikely to result in a hire.

That 4% is the high-confidence number. The full distribution looks like this:

| Ghost Score | Listings | % | |-------------|----------|---| | > 0.8 (very high) | 212 | 0.4% | | 0.6 - 0.8 (high) | 1,890 | 3.6% | | 0.4 - 0.6 (medium) | 13,962 | 26.6% | | < 0.4 (low / healthy) | 36,334 | 69.3% |

The good news: roughly 7 in 10 listings look healthy. The bad news: the remaining 30% sit in a gray zone where one or more quality signals are degraded. If you're mass-applying to 100 jobs, statistically 4 of them are almost certainly not real, and another 26 have at least one red flag worth investigating before you spend time tailoring an application.

Where You Apply Matters More Than How You Apply

This is the finding most people miss. The variance between companies is enormous.

The 10 worst companies we track (by ghost index, minimum 10 jobs):

| Company | Jobs | Ghost Index | |---------|------|-------------| | NOCD | 15 | 60.5 | | Shaw's Supermarkets | 24 | 60.2 | | TextNow | 11 | 56.2 | | Rocket Internet | 16 | 52.4 | | ICEYE | 68 | 48.3 | | Jane Street Capital | 90 | 48.0 | | ColdQuanta | 48 | 47.8 | | Point72 Asset Management | 86 | 47.3 | | ARHS | 52 | 47.2 | | AWeber | 12 | 47.1 |

The 10 most transparent companies (lowest ghost index, minimum 10 jobs):

| Company | Jobs | Ghost Index | |---------|------|-------------| | Collective Health | 16 | 14.7 | | Personify Health | 20 | 16.2 | | Conga | 44 | 16.8 | | PrizePicks | 23 | 17.1 | | GitLab | 88 | 17.3 | | Hootsuite | 30 | 17.7 | | Magnet Forensics | 31 | 17.7 | | Customer.io | 19 | 17.8 | | eCapital | 17 | 17.9 | | Koho Financial | 15 | 18.1 |

The gap between the best and worst is a 4x difference in ghost index. GitLab, with 88 active listings, has a ghost index of 17.3. Jane Street, with 90 listings, sits at 48.0. Same scale, completely different hiring hygiene.

This means the single highest-leverage thing you can do as a job seeker isn't optimizing your resume. It's checking whether the company you're about to apply to is actually hiring in good faith.

The ATS Tells You Something Too

Not all job boards are created equal. We track which Applicant Tracking System each company uses, and the ghost scores vary by platform:

| ATS | Jobs | Avg Ghost Score | |-----|------|-----------------| | Greenhouse | 18,815 | 0.326 | | Ashby | 9,275 | 0.358 | | iCIMS | 3,386 | 0.371 | | Lever | 4,111 | 0.386 | | SmartRecruiters | 4,181 | 0.405 | | Generic HTML pages | 10,499 | 0.422 |

Greenhouse-hosted listings have the lowest ghost scores on average. Generic career pages (no structured ATS) have the highest. This makes sense — companies that invest in structured hiring infrastructure tend to maintain their postings more actively.

If you see a job on a company's bare HTML career page with no ATS, that's a signal to dig deeper before applying.

What This Means for You

The conventional advice is to beat the ATS, network harder, and optimize your resume keywords. None of that advice is wrong, but it's solving the wrong problem if the listing you're applying to isn't a real opportunity.

Before you spend an hour tailoring an application:

Check the posting age. If it's been up for 90+ days with no updates, that's a red flag. One-third of all listings we track fall into this bucket.
Check the company. We publish transparency scores for 1,778 companies and a full ghost jobs report. Look up the company before you apply.
Check the ATS. A structured job board (Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever) is generally a better signal than a bare career page.
Look for specifics. Listings with salary ranges, named hiring managers, and concrete requirements score dramatically better on our engine than vague "fast-paced environment" postings.

The 0.4% success rate isn't just because the market is competitive. It's because a meaningful portion of the listed opportunities aren't real. Your time has value. Spend it on companies that are actually hiring.

We track 52,000+ listings across 1,778 companies daily. Browse the data: Company Scores | Ghost Jobs Report