We rechecked 1,522 job postings. 2 out of 3 were already dead.

JobBloom Ghost Jobs Report · October 2026

If you've ever applied for a job and heard nothing back, the job may no longer exist.

JobBloom finds jobs straight from company career sites. Since March 2026, our users' searches have turned up thousands of job links on platforms like Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, and Workday. On 10 October 2026, we went back and checked every one of them.

Of the 1,326 links we could check, 888 (67%) no longer led to an open job.

Key findings

• 2 in 3 job links were dead. 67% of the postings we could check were closed, deleted or redirected away.

• Spring postings are almost all gone. Of jobs first found between March and June 2026, 77% were dead by October.

• Fresh links aren't safe either. Even among links found in the past week, 22% were already dead when we checked.

• Open listings are often old. Of open postings that show a posting date, more than half (57%) were posted over 90 days ago, and 44% over six months ago.

• Most dead jobs don't look dead. Only 1 in 7 dead postings clearly said "this job is closed". The rest showed an error, quietly redirected to a careers homepage, or loaded a page with no job on it.

How fast jobs disappear

For job seekers, the takeaway is simple: a job link from a few months ago is far more likely to be dead than alive. Old bookmarks, saved searches, reposts,: and aggregator listings are where ghost jobs pile up.

Dead links by hiring platform

These are jobs first found over three months ago. Grouping by age keeps the comparison fair, because some platforms had more recent links than others.

On almost every major platform, roughly 4 in 5 postings were gone after three months. SmartRecruiters kept more listings alive, at 62%. That could mean its jobs stay open longer, or that more of its closed listings stay online.

What a dead job link looks like

Only a small share of dead postings said clearly that the job was closed:

Most of the time, a dead job doesn't announce itself. You land on a blank job page or a general careers site, and it's easy to assume you just clicked the wrong thing.

Dead links by job type

Several categories have small samples, so treat these as rough signals rather than firm rankings.

How to avoid applying to ghost jobs

1. Check the company's own careers page. If the role isn't listed there, it's probably closed.

2. Look for a posting date. A role posted months ago isn't automatically dead, but it deserves a second look.

3. Watch for quiet redirects. If a job link takes you to a general careers page, the job is gone.

4. Make sure the application form loads. No form usually means no job.

5. Ask before you invest hours. A short message to the recruiter ("Is this role still open?") can save you a lot of time.

JobBloom does steps 1, 3 and 4 automatically. It checks every job link before showing it to you and drops postings that are closed, redirected or missing, so you only see roles you can still apply for.

Find live jobs → jobbloom.co

Methodology

• The data. We took every job link saved in JobBloom search results from 31 March to 9 October 2026: 2,151 saved results, which became 1,522 unique links after removing duplicates. Each link was first found through a JobBloom user's search.

• The check. On 10 October 2026, we opened every link with the same checker JobBloom uses to filter search results. We counted a link as dead if:

  • the page returned an error such as 404 or 410

  • it redirected away from the posting, for example to a careers homepage or an error page

  • it said the job was closed or expired

  • It was a platform whose open jobs always include job posting data (Ashby and Workday), and that data was missing

• We spot-checked the last rule against Ashby's and Workday's own job listings and found no live jobs wrongly marked dead.

• Links we couldn't check. 196 links (13%) couldn't be checked, mostly because the site blocked automated visits (HTTP 403). This affected Greenhouse in particular. We left these out of every percentage rather than guessing.

• Time periods. Most links were first found in April and May 2026 (1,226 links) or in the past week (250 links), with few in between. That's why the age table has two groups.

• Platforms left out. We excluded platforms with very few links (iCIMS, Pinpoint, LinkedIn). We also left out Zoho Recruit: some of its links were careers homepages rather than single jobs, and our checker can't reliably tell when a Zoho job closes.

• Limits. These are jobs that turned up in JobBloom searches, not a random sample of every job online. Engineering roles make up about half of them, because that's what our users search for most. A job that closed and then reopened under the same link would count as open. Posting dates come from the job page itself and were only available for 144 open jobs.

Questions about the data, or want the numbers for your own article? Get in touch, and feel free to cite this report with a link to it.