Ghost jobs

How to check whether a posting is still open

Every wording heuristic is a guess. Looking at the employer own careers board is a fact, and it takes about a minute once you know where to look.

Reviewed September 2, 20261 min read

Start from the apply link, not the posting

The apply button usually leaves the job board and lands on the software the employer actually uses. That destination host tells you which system to search, and it is far more reliable than searching the company name and hoping.

Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable, Recruitee, SmartRecruiters

All six publish a complete public list of open roles. Strip the URL back to the company part and you get the whole board: every open posting, nothing hidden. If the role is not on that list, the version you were reading has outlived its source. This is the same list our own check reads.

Workday, iCIMS, Teamtailor and the rest

These publish no straightforward list, so search the careers site by title and location instead. Absence is weaker evidence here: a search that finds nothing may be the search failing rather than the posting being gone.

What an absence does and does not prove

A posting missing from a complete board is strong evidence it has closed. A posting missing from a board you could not fully read proves nothing, which is why our own check refuses to score absence when a vendor paginates and we did not finish reading. Treat a short or truncated list the same way.

Related reading

Check the posting before you spend an hour on it

Paste the link or the description. We check it against the employer own job board where we can, show you every signal that fired with the words that triggered it, and tell you plainly what we could not check. Free, and no account.