You send off your résumé, wait for a reply and get nothing. Weeks later, the company is still advertising for the same job.

It’s easy to wonder what went wrong with your application, but the company might not have been hiring at all. That job you applied for might not exist.

“Ghost jobs” look like real opportunities, but the companies posting them have no intention of hiring for the roles. AI career tool Kickresume recently conducted an analysis of 96,902 job postings on Indeed in search of ghost jobs.

Kickresume looked for three red flags: listings that had been live for more than 30 days, identical ads posted again and calls for “urgent hiring” with no application deadline. The analysis covered six fields: technology, finance, recruitment, marketing, healthcare and business.

In the U.S., more than a third of job listings, or 36%, had been sitting online for at least 30 days. The share was even higher in tech, where 43% of postings had passed the one-month mark. That doesn’t necessarily mean those jobs were fake, but it does indicate that applicants should do more digging before applying for the role.

The other two red flags barely showed up. Exact copies of previously posted listings accounted for just 0.1% of ads, as did postings that promised “urgent hiring” without giving applicants a deadline. Of the three signals the study examined, older listings were by far the most common.

“It was a nice surprise to see that exact reposts and adverts that don’t have a closing date but specify “urgent hiring” were both rare,” Peter Duris, CEO and Co-founder of Kickresume, said in a statement. “These are two key warning signs that a job may not be genuine.”

Why ghost jobs exist

Why advertise a job that isn’t available? Sometimes, employers collect résumés for future openings or use listings to see how low of a salary they can offer while still attracting applicants, Kickresume noted.

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