By Rameez Khizer:
Has this ever happened to you? You were going back and forth with a company who potentially wanted to hire you, and communication was strong and promising. You may have done a couple interviews for the potential role as well. Then suddenly, the company disappeared or claimed the job is no longer available. Well, there’s a chance that job never existed in the first place! Ghost jobs, or fake job postings, are disrupting the cybersecurity market by wasting skilled talent's time, creating false signals about labor demand and forcing cyber professionals to navigate deceptive listings while employers miss out on genuine candidates. This slows down the overall tech hiring despite high demand for actual security roles. This phantom workforce phenomenon misleads policymakers, job reports and motivates job candidates by clogging the hiring pipeline with non-existent roles and masks the true urgency for cyber talent in a world facing increasing digital threats. Companies post "ghost jobs” job listings for positions they have no immediate intention of filling—primarily for strategic business and human resources reasons. A key motivation is talent pooling, allowing them to constantly collect resumes from qualified individuals to build a database of potential candidates for future openings, which speeds up the hiring process when a real need arises. Employers also use these postings for market research, assessing the availability of specific skills in the labor force and gauging current salary expectations without committing to a hire. In other cases, they may be fulfilling internal HR policies that require a role to be advertised externally even if an internal candidate has already been selected. Beyond talent acquisition strategy, other reasons are related to public image and internal employee management. Posting numerous job ads creates the illusion of company growth and stability to attract investors and clients. Internally, these postings can be used to manage current employees' perceptions: some employers want staff to believe extra help is on the way to alleviate heavy workloads, while others use the practice to make employees feel replaceable, subtly pressuring them to work harder out of fear of losing their jobs. Finally, some ghost jobs are simply the result of human oversight, where listings for positions that have been filled are accidentally left active on various job boards.
The concept of ghost jobs acts as a non-monetary tax on job seekers, forcing them to spend valuable time and emotional energy on applications that are artificial. For cyber professionals, this means sifting through listings that promise high-level security roles but lead nowhere, diminishing their confidence and slowing their ability to find real work. This also creates a paradox where actual, urgent cyber roles might receive fewer applications as candidates become more cautious, slowing down legitimate hiring in a critical field.
Beyond time wastage, ghost jobs present serious data privacy and security concerns, especially in the cyber sector. While some are accidental, others are deliberate, potentially serving as sophisticated methods for data collection, creating large talent pools under false pretenses, or may even serve as the primary stages of phishing campaigns. A deceptive job post can be a smokescreen for social engineering, tricking applicants into revealing sensitive personal information or downloading malicious software, turning the job search into a cybersecurity risk itself.
The impact extends to economic policy, as government data on job openings gets muddied by non-existent roles, making it harder for bodies like the Federal Reserve to accurately gauge labor market tightness. This clouds judgment on economic indicators, but more acutely for cyber, it masks the true depth of the talent shortage, potentially delaying crucial investments and policy responses needed to bolster national cyber defenses against growing threats.
To combat the ghost job phenomenon, greater transparency and accountability are needed from both companies and job platforms. Employers must commit to posting only real, active openings, while platforms should implement stricter verification protocols to flag deceptive listings. Restoring trust through accurate signals in the job market is vital, ensuring that the time and skills of cybersecurity professionals are directed toward filling actual gaps, not chasing phantoms, thereby strengthening the entire cyber and more importantly, the employment ecosystem.