I Built Deghost: A Job Search That Respects Your Time

It Started at the Kitchen Table

My wife is one of the hardest-working people I know. When she started looking for a new role, she did everything right — tailored her resume for each application, wrote thoughtful cover letters, researched every company. She treated the job search like a full-time job.

Weeks turned into months. She'd apply to positions that seemed perfect. Well-written descriptions, reputable companies, roles that matched her experience exactly. And then... nothing. No rejection. No interview. No acknowledgment that a human being had spent hours preparing an application.

At first, we assumed it was just the market. Competition is tough. But then we started noticing patterns.

The Realization

A listing she applied to in December was still posted in February — word for word, same description, same requirements. She found the same role posted across three different job boards with different dates, as if it had just gone live. One company had 15 identical openings for the same position across different cities.

That's when I started digging. And what I found made me angry.

The Numbers Are Staggering

Research from the Columbia Law Review shows that up to 40% of companies admit to posting ghost jobs — listings they had no immediate intention to fill. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data reveals that employers reported 7.4 million job openings but made only 5.2 million hires. Nearly one in three postings never resulted in a hire.

These aren't just numbers. Each one represents a real person — someone like my wife — who spent their evening writing a cover letter, (which, let's be honest, will never really be read) instead of being with their family. Someone who got their hopes up for a role that was never going to be filled. Someone whose confidence took another hit when they didn't hear back. It's dishonest, disheartening and frustrating.

What Ghost Jobs Really Cost

The financial cost is real — time spent applying is time not spent elsewhere. But the emotional cost is worse.

My wife started questioning herself. Was her resume not good enough? Were her skills outdated? Was she doing something wrong? The answer was no. She was doing everything right. The jobs just weren't real. The market is simply broken.

That self-doubt is what ghost jobs inflict on millions of job seekers. It's not a minor inconvenience — it's a systemic problem that erodes people's confidence and wastes collective millions of hours every year.

Building the Solution

I'm a software engineer. When I see a problem with data, my instinct is to build something. So I started asking: what if you could know, before you apply, whether a job posting is likely real?

That question became Deghost.

The idea is simple: aggregate job listings from every major source, analyze each one against verification signals, and surface the ones that are most likely to be genuine opportunities. Flag the ones that show ghost job patterns. Give job seekers the information they need to make better decisions about where to invest their time.

How It Works

Deghost checks every listing against 10 signals:

• How long has it been posted? Listings open for 60+ days are far more likely to be ghosts.
• Is it posted by a staffing agency? Agency postings have different dynamics than direct company postings.
• Does it appear on multiple sources? Cross-verified listings are more likely to be real.
• Does the company have a pattern? Some companies consistently post ghost jobs — we track that.
• Is there salary transparency? Real openings are more likely to include compensation.
• What does Glassdoor say? Company ratings and review counts add context.

Each job gets a verification score from 0 to 100. You can see at a glance which positions have strong signals of being real and which ones raise red flags.

It's Not Just About Detection

Detection is the starting point, but the real goal is to change the culture around job postings.

We built a company leaderboard that publicly ranks companies by their ghost job percentage. Transparency creates accountability. When companies know their ghost job rate is visible, they have an incentive to clean up their listings.

We built a free checking tool where anyone can paste a job URL and get an instant analysis. No account required. If a friend sends you a job listing, you can verify it in seconds.

And we made the data open. Our statistics page shows real-time ghost job rates across countries and sources. Journalists, researchers, and policymakers can use this data to understand the scope of the problem.

For My Wife, and for Everyone Like Her

My wife eventually will find a great role — at a company that is actually hiring. But the months of applying to ghost jobs will definitely left a mark. No one should have to go through that.

Deghost exists because job seekers deserve to know whether a position is real before they invest their time and emotional energy in an application. Your time matters. Your effort matters. And you deserve a job market that respects both.

If you're in the middle of a job search right now, I hope Deghost helps you focus on the opportunities that are actually there. Browse verified jobs, check a listing, or set up alerts so you're the first to know when real positions open up.

And if you've been burned by ghost jobs too — you're not alone. That's exactly why this exists.

The world is already a dark place, specially in 2026. So let's be kind, be mindful, help each other out. There's nothing wrong with it.

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Douglas Pires is the founder of Deghost. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.