The rise of the 'ghost job'
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 18 December 2025
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
You might be familiar with the term "ghosting" when it comes to dating. One minute you’re talking to someone, the next they disappear.
The same thing is now happening in the job market, with employers not responding to candidates or posting roles that never existed.
It’s a problem thought to affect millions.
In this programme, we hear why "ghost jobs" have become so common, look at the new rules meant to curb the practice, and hear directly from job seekers about how it makes them feel.
You can email us - our address is businessdaily@bbc.co.uk
Presenter: Megan Lawton Producer: Sam Gruet
(Picture: Woman applying for a job online. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm Megan Lawton. Today, it's not just across certain industries and it's not just across certain businesses. |
| 0:20.5 | A word you might associate with dating dating now appearing in the job market. |
| 0:25.5 | I've been ghosted by small businesses and I've also been ghosted by big corporations. |
| 0:31.9 | We're talking about ghost jobs, fake, outdated or placeholder job listings that companies post without any real intention |
| 0:40.1 | fulfilling the position. As many as four in 10 companies say they have posted a job listing this |
| 0:45.5 | year that simply doesn't exist, while 3 in 10 say that they are currently advertising for a role |
| 0:51.0 | that isn't real. That's in the US, and it's a similar picture where I am in Canada and the UK too. |
| 0:57.6 | Today, we'll learn why companies post these listings. |
| 1:00.7 | This hurts the job seekers so much and so the question becomes, is this really ethical for a company to do? |
| 1:07.6 | Meet the applicants who've applied for jobs that don't exist. |
| 1:12.5 | It took my breath away and was a little overwhelming to know that I wasn't alone in the dark. And look at the efforts being made to |
| 1:18.1 | stop the practice. That's coming up on today's Business Daily. When was the last time you |
| 1:26.1 | applied for a job? |
| 1:32.5 | Talk to any job seeker and they will likely tell you that applications are time consuming. |
| 1:39.8 | I will spend like a typical working day looking for jobs, so a good eight hours. |
| 1:40.8 | That's Alish. |
| 1:44.4 | She's based in the UK and after being made redundant last year, |
| 1:50.3 | she's come across plenty of so-called ghost jobs. The term describes listings for seemingly open roles which companies have no intention of actually filling. If I had a pound for how many |
| 1:56.4 | times this has happened to me, I would no longer need to work because I would be sipping a margarita on a beach |
| 2:03.1 | somewhere because I would have all the money in the world. I dread to think how many times |
| 2:09.7 | that this has happened to me and it's scary how rife it is. We'll be back with Aylish a little |
... |
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