> This is the markdown version of https://www.classet.ai/blog/ghost-jobs-tax > Learn more at https://www.classet.ai ![Low-poly illustration of job postings fading into transparent outlines, with one solid posting standing apart](/_next/image?url=%2Fimages%2Fblog%2Fghost-jobs-tax.png&w=3840&q=75) # A State Just Subpoenaed LinkedIn Over Fake Jobs. Most Ghost Jobs Aren't Even Scams. Texas is investigating LinkedIn over ghost jobs. But most fake-looking postings come out of ordinary hiring, and they tax the next real req you need to fill. [![Paul Jones](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fassets.basehub.com%2Fe0b5701f%2F6599306507912123f90f150a8bfaaf6c%2Fscreenshot-2026-01-28-at-10.53.16-am.png%3Fwidth%3D100%26height%3D100%26quality%3D100&w=96&q=75) Paul JonesHead of Growth at Classet ](/blog/authors/paul-jones) July 16, 2026 AI Recruiting, Hiring Tips You probably saw the headline, so I'll keep the news short. On July 15, the Texas Attorney General opened a formal investigation into LinkedIn for advertising and profiting from "ghost jobs," listings with no real opening behind them, shown to people paying $39.99 to $69.99 a month for Premium. The state issued a [civil investigative demand for LinkedIn's job-verification records](https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-general-ken-paxton-investigates-linkedin-advertising-fake-and-misleading-job-opportunities). Paxton's framing: LinkedIn "has a duty to provide the services it advertises." It's easy to read that as a LinkedIn problem. That's the part I want to argue with, because most ghost jobs aren't scams at all. They come out of everyday hiring, done by people with good intentions, and they cost you money in a way that never shows up on a report. Quick answer A ghost job is a listing with no real opening behind it. Most aren't fraud. They're evergreen reqs kept live for pipeline, roles posted after an internal hire is already decided, and openings filled weeks ago that nobody took down. Each is defensible from the inside, and to a candidate all three look identical to what Texas is investigating LinkedIn for. The cost lands on your next real req, because once candidates assume postings are fake, your best prospects stop applying to the ones that aren't. ## Three ways a good team posts a ghost job There's the evergreen req you keep live to build pipeline, because you know you'll need three of these people by Q4 and you'd rather have resumes ready. There's the role you post publicly while the internal hire is already decided, because policy says every opening gets posted. And there's the opening that got filled three weeks ago and is still up because taking it down is a ticket nobody files. Every one of those is reasonable from the inside, and not one involves a person deciding to deceive anybody. But flip to the other side of the screen. A candidate spends forty minutes on your application, writes the cover letter, answers the screener questions, and hears nothing, because there was nothing to hear. From where they're sitting, your evergreen pipeline req and a fake listing on a subscription site are the same object. They cannot tell the difference, and it isn't reasonable to expect them to. ## The scale is worse than it feels This is where I stopped defending the practice, because the numbers are not small. In a November 2025 Columbia Law Review analysis, Daniel Grimm pulled together the prevalence estimates, and they land in a wide but ugly band: [up to 21% of Glassdoor postings could be ghost jobs](https://www.columbialawreview.org/content/ghost-jobs/), roughly one in five active postings on Greenhouse, and a Resume Builder survey of 1,641 hiring managers where 40% said their company had advertised a ghost job in the past year. Texas cites the same range in its filing: between a fifth and a third of online listings. The number that got me is the one about outcomes. Grimm found the rate of hires per job posting has roughly halved in five years, from about eight hires per ten listings in 2019 down to four per ten by 2024. A majority of job postings now end in nobody getting hired. Candidates are not paranoid. They are doing math. They feel it on the other end too. Criteria's 2026 Candidate Experience Report found [53% of job seekers were ghosted by an employer in the past year](https://fortune.com/2026/03/20/job-seekers-arent-imagining-things-candidates-ghosted-by-employers-hit-three-year-high/), up from 48% in 2025 and 38% in 2024. Every dead posting teaches the same lesson, which is: assume the job isn't real. 4 in 10 Job postings that end in an actual hire, down from 8 in 10 in 2019 53% Job seekers ghosted by an employer in the past year, a three-year high 40% Hiring managers who say their company posted a ghost job last year ## Every ghost job taxes your next real one Here's the part that matters to you, and it has nothing to do with ethics or with Texas. The req you actually need to fill is the one that pays for all of it. Once candidates assume postings are fake, they split two directions, and both are bad for you. The great ones stop applying, because they have options and no patience for a coin flip. Everyone else sprays fifty AI-generated applications at the wall hoping one sticks, which is [the application flood](/blog/ai-application-flood) landing in your inbox every morning. That flood is partly a trust problem wearing a technology costume. People bulk-apply because they have learned that any single application probably goes nowhere. Your best passive candidates are the most skeptical of the bunch. Someone who already has a job and is good at it will not spend an evening on a months-old post with no name attached, no salary, and no sign a human is reading. It reads as a pipeline trap, so they scroll past. The people you most want to reach are the ones a ghost job scares off first, and you never see them, because not-applying is invisible in your funnel. So trust is now a conversion lever, and a cheap one. A named hiring manager. A posted salary. A fast reply from a person. In a market where a third of listings may be fake, those are what get your best prospects to apply at all. A ghost job is cheap to post and expensive to keep. The bill comes due on your next real req. ## Give every posting a shelf life So here's the fix I'd actually try, and it's dumber than it sounds. A ghost job survives because nothing forces it to die. Nobody is in favor of it. It just sits there, because deleting it is somebody's twelfth priority. So build in the expiration. Stamp your postings like a carton of milk. Put a visible line at the top of the listing: "Opened June 30 · auto-closes July 21 unless we're still hiring." Then wire your ATS so the req genuinely expires on that date and a human has to consciously renew it. Not a reminder email. An actual expiration. Two things happen, and I care about both. Candidates can see the job is alive and being worked, so your real posts convert better against a field of listings that show nothing. And your own team has to fish or cut bait every couple of weeks, which clears out the graveyard of reqs nobody is filling. For bonus points, stamp your median reply time next to it. "We answer every applicant within 5 days" is a flex almost nobody can honestly make right now, which is exactly why it works. Two caveats, because this cuts both ways. Only stamp a promise you'll keep, since an expired "we reply in 5 days" is worse than never saying it. And if a req really is evergreen, say so out loud. "We hire installers continuously, this is an open pipeline" is honest, and some people will still apply. Dressing a pipeline up as a live opening is what burns the trust. The reply-time promise is the hard one, and I'll be straight about why I think about it: this is the corner we work in. Joy, our AI phone screener, calls applicants the moment they apply, which is how you keep a five-day promise when four hundred people apply in a week. But the shelf-life idea costs nothing and works no matter what you use. If you want the longer version of the trust problem, we wrote a [guide to ghosting in both directions](/blog/candidate-ghosting-guide). ## Questions we get about this What exactly counts as a ghost job? A listing that either doesn't correspond to an actual open position, or is posted when the employer has no present intention of filling the role. That's the definition Texas is using in the LinkedIn investigation. Note what it doesn't require: intent to deceive. An evergreen pipeline req and a filled role nobody took down both qualify, even though nobody set out to mislead anyone. Is posting an evergreen req actually wrong? Not inherently, and I'd push back on anyone who says otherwise. Continuous hiring is real, especially in trades and high-volume roles where you need a standing pipeline. The problem isn't the pipeline. It's presenting it as a specific live opening. Say "we hire CDL drivers continuously" and you keep both the pipeline and the trust. The dishonesty is in the costume, not the practice. Does the Texas investigation mean employers are liable? No. The civil investigative demand targets LinkedIn, and the theory is about a subscription product: whether the company sold Premium access to job listings it didn't verify. Employers aren't the subject. But the framing is worth watching, because "you have a duty to provide what you advertise" is not an idea that stays confined to one platform forever. How do I know if my own postings look like ghost jobs? Pull every live req and ask two questions per posting: is there a person who will get hired for this in the next 30 days, and has anyone touched the applicants in the last 7? Anything that fails both is a ghost job to your candidates regardless of what you meant. Also check your hires-per-posting ratio against the benchmark Grimm cites, roughly four per ten. If you're well under it, candidates are already learning something about you. Won't an expiration date just create renewal busywork? That's the feature. The renewal click is the moment somebody has to say out loud that this role is real, which is the decision that never gets made today. If renewing every req is genuinely too much work, you have more open reqs than hiring capacity, and your candidates already figured that out. ## What to do this week Pull your live reqs and count the ones where nobody will be hired in the next month. That number is your ghost job rate, and it's the tax you're paying on the roles you actually need to fill. Then pick one posting, stamp an expiration date and a reply-time promise on it, and see whether it converts better than the ones next to it. If the reply-time half is where you get stuck, [see how Joy handles it](/demo). If it isn't, take the shelf life anyway. [![Paul Jones](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fassets.basehub.com%2Fe0b5701f%2F6599306507912123f90f150a8bfaaf6c%2Fscreenshot-2026-01-28-at-10.53.16-am.png%3Fwidth%3D100%26height%3D100%26quality%3D100&w=128&q=75) Paul Jones Head of Growth at Classet Paul comes from an operator background running an Alpine-owned company, and brings firsthand experience with the hiring challenges Classet was built to solve. He's driven by a belief that the right technology can make meaningful work more accessible. ](/blog/authors/paul-jones) Follow Classet in Google Add classet.ai as a preferred source and our hiring research is more likely to show up in your Top Stories and AI Overviews. 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