You tailor the resume. You write the cover letter. You hit submit, and nothing happens. Six weeks later the posting is still live.
You may have applied to a ghost job, and in Ontario that posting now has to tell you.
What is a ghost job?
A ghost job is a publicly advertised posting for a role the employer has no current intention of filling. The company is real. The posting is real. The application goes into a real applicant tracking system. What is missing is a live requisition behind it.
That makes ghost jobs different from job scams. A scam posting is fraud, run by someone impersonating an employer to harvest personal data or money. A ghost job is usually posted by a legitimate company with a legitimate careers page, which is exactly why it is so hard to spot.
Why companies post ghost jobs
Very few of these are posted maliciously, and understanding the real reasons makes them easier to identify.
- Talent pipelining. The most common reason by some distance. The employer wants a bank of pre-screened candidates ready for a role they expect to open later. In a LiveCareer survey of 918 HR professionals in March 2025, half named pipeline building as their motivation.
- A requisition that was never closed. The role got filled internally, or the budget was pulled, and nobody took the posting down. Genuinely an administrative failure rather than a strategy.
- A hiring freeze the company is not announcing. Postings stay live so the business does not look like it has stopped growing.
- Market testing. The employer wants to know whether the talent exists at the salary they have in mind before they seek budget approval.
- Signalling to existing staff. The least defensible reason, and it is documented. A 2024 Resume Builder survey found employers using postings to suggest relief was coming for overworked teams, or to remind staff they were replaceable.
- Perpetual roles. High-turnover positions where the employer is always accepting applications. Arguably not ghost jobs at all, though they behave like them from the outside.
How common are ghost jobs?
More common than most job seekers realise, and less precisely measurable than most articles suggest.
The Congressional Research Service noted in April 2025 that there are no official statistics on the scale of the practice. Every figure in circulation comes from a private survey or an analysis of public data, and they measure different things:
- Around 1 in 3 employers admit posting roles with no current intent to hire, in a January 2025 Clarify Capital survey of 1,000 employers. That measures stated intent.
- 40% of 650 hiring managers surveyed by Resume Builder in 2024 said their company had posted a role it did not intend to fill, with three in ten saying one was live at the time they answered.
- Roughly 30% of United States postings never result in a hire, derived from the gap between job openings and hires in Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
- Around 18% when measured from applicant tracking system outcomes rather than surveys, which is the lowest credible figure and the one based on what actually happened rather than what employers said.
Those numbers disagree because they ask different questions. Self-reported intent runs higher than measured outcomes, and a posting that never produced a hire is not necessarily a posting that was never meant to. Taken together they put the real rate somewhere between one in five and one in three.
Canadian-specific data is thinner still. Most of the research above is American, and anyone quoting a precise Canadian percentage is almost certainly extrapolating.
Are ghost jobs illegal in Ontario?
No. But since 1 January 2026, Ontario employers have to tell you when a posting is one.
This is the part most coverage of ghost jobs misses. Ontario is one of the first jurisdictions anywhere to legislate specifically against the practice, and it did so deliberately. Reporting on the legislation by Torys LLP notes that according to the Minister of Labour, the changes were inspired in part by a desire to combat ghost jobs.
The mechanism is disclosure rather than prohibition. Under Part III.1 of the Employment Standards Act, with the operating detail in Ontario Regulation 476/24, every publicly advertised job posting must include a statement saying whether the posting is for an existing vacancy. Osler describes the rationale as helping applicants distinguish real openings from speculative postings intended to gauge talent or gather market data.
Three things follow from that, and they matter if you are applying or hiring in Ontario:
- Pipelining is still allowed. An employer can advertise to build a candidate bank. They simply have to say that is what they are doing.
- The rule applies to employers with 25 or more employees on the day the posting goes up. Smaller employers are outside it.
- It applies to publicly advertised postings. General recruitment campaigns and help wanted signs that do not name a specific role are excluded, as are roles performed outside Ontario.
The vacancy statement also arrived alongside a set of related obligations: compensation disclosure, a declaration where artificial intelligence is used to screen or select candidates, a ban on Canadian experience requirements, and a duty to tell interviewed candidates the outcome within 45 days of their last interview. We cover all six in our guide to Ontario job posting requirements.
Do recruitment agencies post ghost jobs?
Some do, and it is worth understanding why before you judge any agency posting, including ours.
The Congressional Research Service noted in 2025 that staffing agencies may post openings to show employers they could recruit talented people. That motive survives even when an agency has plenty of candidates, because the audience is the client rather than the applicant. Others post to build a candidate database, since paying job boards repeatedly for the same applicants has become expensive. A third group keeps roles live because a client asked them to stay engaged between real requisitions.
Two things that look like ghost jobs from an agency usually are not. Confidential searches, where the client cannot be named, read as suspicious even though the role is real and urgent. And when an agency and its client both advertise the same opening, candidates see it twice and reasonably assume one is fake.
For our part, every posting on this site is fed from our applicant tracking system by API and maps to a signed client requisition. A ghost job here would require someone to create a fake requisition, which is a deliberate act with an audit trail rather than simply publishing a page. Every live role on our board carries a statement saying it is an existing vacancy, and you are welcome to check any of them.
The commercial reason is simpler than the ethical one. The main motive for posting ghost jobs is collecting resumes, and we have the opposite problem: we receive far more applications than we have roles for. Advertising to build a database is not something we need to do.
How to spot a ghost job
In Ontario, start with the obvious one: look for the vacancy statement. A compliant posting from an employer of 25 or more people should tell you directly. Its absence is now itself a signal, either that the employer is small enough to be exempt or that they have not caught up with the rules.
Beyond that, the reliable indicators are behavioural rather than textual:
- It has been live a long time. Check the posting date on the company’s own careers page rather than the job board, which often refreshes dates. A technical role open for more than eight weeks with no change is worth questioning.
- It reappears on a cycle. The same role, reposted every few weeks, usually means a pipeline rather than a vacancy.
- The requirements are impossibly broad. Ten years of experience in five unrelated stacks tends to indicate nobody has scoped the role, which usually means nobody is hiring for it.
- No named hiring manager, no team detail, no interview process described. Live requisitions have owners. Speculative ones often do not.
- The company is publicly in a hiring freeze while the posting stays up.
- No compensation information, from a large Ontario employer. Since January 2026 that is a compliance gap, and a posting that ignores one rule may be ignoring others.
None of these is conclusive on its own. Two or three together usually are.
If you are the one hiring
The compliance answer is simple: include the vacancy statement, and make it accurate. The strategic answer is more interesting.
Ghost jobs have a cost that rarely appears on anyone’s balance sheet. Candidates talk. Engineering communities in Toronto, Waterloo and Ottawa are small enough that a company known for postings that go nowhere finds its response rate dropping on the roles it genuinely needs to fill. We see this from the recruiting side regularly: the third approach to a strong candidate is much harder when the first two were for roles that never existed.
There is also a straightforward legitimate use of pipelining, now that it has to be labelled. A posting that says plainly that it is building a candidate pool for anticipated roles attracts people who are open to a conversation rather than urgently job hunting, and it does not burn the ones who are. Disclosure makes that a feature rather than a liability.
If you are drafting postings against the new rules, our job posting template covers the required statements, and the compliance checklist runs through the full workflow.
And if you would rather skip the market entirely, we work live requisitions for Canadian technology teams. Every role on our job board is one a client is actively hiring for.