How to tell if a job posting is real and still open

A ghost job is a posting for a role nobody is actively filling: it was filled, frozen, or never real. A fake posting is worse, a scam dressed up as a job. Five checks catch most of both before you spend an evening on an application.

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1. Find it on the employer’s own careers site

Job boards copy postings and often keep them up after the employer has taken them down. The employer’s own careers site is the source. If the job isn’t there, either it has closed or it was never the employer’s.

Paste a LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor or company link into Check a job. We find the employer’s own posting and show whether it is still listed there.

2. See how long it has really been up

The posted date on a job board isn’t reliable. Employers refresh it, and boards reset it when they copy a posting, so a job can show “posted today” for months. What matters is when the posting first appeared on the employer’s site.

Of the 46,373 open jobs we saw on employers’ sites in early November 2026, half had been up for more than 37 days and a quarter for more than 90. A long-open posting isn’t automatically a ghost: some roles are hard to fill, and some employers hire for the same role all year. But past three months, it is worth asking the recruiter whether the role is still open before you put in the work.

Every job on Wait, What Do You Do? shows the date we first saw it, under “First seen by us”.

3. Check whether it has been reposted

Some employers take a posting down and post the same job again as if it were new, which resets its age everywhere. We count a repost when the same employer lists the same title in the same place within 60 days of taking the last one down. In early November 2026, 2,130 of those open jobs, about one in twenty, were reposts. A repost can mean the first hire fell through. It can also mean a posting that is always up.

4. Read what the posting actually says

A real opening usually names a team, the work, and who you’d report to or work with. A posting that could describe any company, lists no pay where the law requires it, or asks for “all levels” of experience may be collecting resumes for later.

5. Walk away from any job that asks you for money

The Federal Trade Commission’s guidance is plain: honest employers never charge you to get hired. A request to pay for training, equipment or placement is a scam. So is a check you’re told to deposit and send part of back, and so is an offer of a lot of money for very little work.

Every job on our board comes from an employer’s own hiring system.