Offboard Ghost-Job Checker

We built this because we kept watching people do everything right and still hear nothing. A ghost job is a posting that was never going to result in a hire: a role that's already filled, a listing left up for months after the search ended, a repost cycled to look fresh, or a posting that exists mostly to collect resumes and signal growth. From the outside, it looks identical to a real opening. You tailor a resume, write a cover letter, answer the screener questions, and the application lands nowhere, because there was never anywhere for it to land.

What it looks at

The checker examines the signals that separate a live search from a zombie posting.

• Posting age, and whether the listing has been quietly refreshed to look newer
• Repost patterns: the same role appearing, vanishing, and reappearing over time
• Cross-board duplication, and whether the details stay consistent between copies
• Company signals, like whether the role still exists on the company's own careers page

What you get

A risk score and a plain-language read: what looks solid, what looks off, and why. It's not a verdict, and we won't pretend it's infallible; some postings are simply ambiguous from the outside. What it does reliably is catch the obvious cases before you invest an evening, so your best hours go to roles that can actually hire you. Boards that index career pages directly, like Hiring Cafe, start you from cleaner listings; the checker matters most on high-volume boards like LinkedIn Jobs, where postings can outlive the roles behind them.

Where it lives

The checker runs automatically inside every Offboard Job Packet. Paste a posting and the ghost-job check is the first gate: if the role looks real, the packet continues into the role-match read, tailored materials, company intel, and a warm path to a person. If it doesn't, you find out in a minute instead of a month.