Some of the silence in your job search isn’t about you. A meaningful slice of what’s posted on job boards was never going to hire anyone — adverts for roles that don’t exist, posted for reasons that have nothing to do with you, alongside a smaller but nastier category: listings designed to steal your money, your identity, or your unpaid work.
Knowing how to spot both changes your search twice over: you stop wasting evenings on phantom vacancies, and you stop interpreting their silence as your failure.
Ghost jobs: adverts with nobody behind them
A “ghost job” is a posting with no live intention to hire. Companies post them for mundane institutional reasons: compliance rules requiring external advertisement of a role already promised internally; recruiters and agencies harvesting CVs to fill their databases for future vacancies; managers keeping a posting permanently open to build a pipeline “just in case”; adverts left up after a hiring freeze because nobody’s job is to take them down; and occasionally, listings posted to signal growth to investors or unsettle competitors.
None of this is illegal and most of it isn’t even malicious — but from your side of the screen, a ghost job consumes a tailored application and returns nothing, ever.
The warning signs, none conclusive alone but telling in combination: a posting that’s been up for months, or reposted on a cycle, with wording unchanged; vagueness where specifics should be (no team, no manager, no location, duties that read like a template); an advert for a permanently-hiring “evergreen” role at a company not visibly growing; salary and details withheld while the ad asks maximal information from you; and — checkable in two minutes — a role that appears on a job board but not on the company’s own careers page.
The defences are cheap. Prefer recent postings; freshness is the single best proxy for a real vacancy. Cross-check the company’s own site. Weight your effort by evidence of life: a named manager, a specific team, a start date, an advert that reads like someone described an actual Tuesday in the job. And let ghost-awareness recalibrate your morale arithmetic: some fraction of your unanswered applications were unanswerable. That’s not consolation-prize thinking; it’s accuracy.
The scams: when the “job” is hunting you
Ghost jobs waste your time. Scams want more. The modern versions are polished — real company names cloned, plausible recruiter profiles, professional-looking offer letters — but they share a skeleton, because every job scam must eventually do one of four things:
Ask you to pay. For training, equipment, background checks, visa processing, “administration.” A real employer pays its own hiring costs, full stop. Any request for money, however small and however plausibly explained, ends the conversation.
Ask for identity documents or bank details too early. Real employers need bank details at contract stage and identity verification at onboarding — after an offer, after interviews, from a corporate system. Anyone requesting passport scans, full date of birth, or account numbers at “application” stage is harvesting, not hiring.
Move money through you. Any role involving receiving funds into your own account and forwarding them on — “payment processing,” “finance assistant, remote” — is money laundering with your name on it. The cheque-then-refund variant (they overpay you, ask you to return the difference, their cheque bounces) remains a classic because it keeps working.
Extract free work. A “trial task” that is suspiciously complete, commercially useful work — a full design, a marketing plan for a real product, several days of coding — may be a work-harvesting scheme dressed as assessment. Reasonable assessments are bounded, representative, and rarely exceed a couple of hours; beyond that, professionals may fairly ask about payment or decline.
Around the skeleton, the soft tissue of manipulation: speed and pressure (“we need your details today to hold the position”), flattery without process (an offer after one brief chat, an approach for a senior role that somehow requires no interview), channel oddities (recruitment conducted entirely over WhatsApp or Telegram; interviews by text chat only; email from a free domain or a domain one letter off the real one), and too-good arithmetic (salary far above market for minimal stated requirements — pricing designed to switch off scepticism).
The verification habit
You don’t need paranoia; you need one habit: verify through a second, independent channel before anything sensitive changes hands. Find the company’s real website yourself (not through the link they sent) and check the vacancy exists there. Look the recruiter up on LinkedIn and see whether the profile has history and mutual connections, then contact the company through its published channels if anything feels off. Check the email domain letter by letter. And if pressure is applied when you slow down to verify — that pressure is itself the answer, because no legitimate employer punishes due diligence.
If you’ve already been caught: stop contact, keep all correspondence, alert your bank immediately if money or account details are involved, and report it — in the UK, to Action Fraud; elsewhere, to your national fraud service and the platform where the “job” was posted. No embarrassment is warranted. These operations are professional, and their victims include the highly experienced.
A job search runs on hope, which is exactly what both ghost jobs and scammers exploit. Guard the hope: aim it at postings that show signs of life, and give nobody your money, your documents, or your unpaid week. The real vacancies deserve all of it.
One more advantage of an organised search: CandidRecord keeps a clear record of every role and application, so you always know exactly what you sent, to whom, and when. [Keep your search on the record.]