Unlisted, a platform that reads public APIs of applicant tracking systems rather than scraping job boards, has published its September 2026 Ghost Jobs Report measuring 607,050 open postings across 15 ATS platforms. The headline finding: 163,057 postings — 28.3% of all dated listings — have been open for more than 90 days, with 94,106 sitting past the 180-day mark. The median open posting is 36 days old. These are not estimates; every posting was live on its employer's own careers site when the sweep ran. The distribution tells a story of two markets. Just under half (45.1%) of postings are less than 30 days old — plausibly active hiring. But the long tail is enormous: 16.3% of all open postings have been live for more than six months. Meanwhile, the closure data offers a sanity check in the other direction: 14.6% of postings that closed in the last 30 days came down within a week, suggesting those were real, filled roles. Only 4.2% of closures were followed by an identical repost within 30 days. Sector variation is stark. Hospitality leads the stale rankings at 43.9% over 90 days with a 65-day median age, while healthcare turns over fastest at 19.7% stale and a 29-day median. Engineering sits at 32.3% stale — roughly one in three software and technical roles on employer sites has been collecting dust for a quarter. The employer-level data is more revealing still: Whataburger Restaurants shows 83.9% of its 4,184 postings over 90 days old with a median age of 239 days, while American Logistics Authority has 100% of 2,597 postings stale at a 308-day median. The ATS platform matters more than you might expect. Lever boards carry 48.2% stale postings with an 83-day median; BambooHR follows at 47.9% and 79 days. Workday, the enterprise giant handling 226,520 postings — the largest single platform in the dataset — sits at just 17.2% stale with a 26-day median. Whether this reflects Workday's client base (large enterprises with HR process discipline) or platform features that nudge cleanup is an open question, but the spread from 17% to 48% across ATS systems is not noise. Geographically, Sweden and the Netherlands stand out with 40.9% and 39.2% stale shares respectively, while Australia runs leanest at 21.5%. The United States, contributing 334,681 postings — more than half the dataset — sits at 26.2% stale with a 34-day median. Salary transparency varies wildly: 50.7% of US postings state a salary versus 1.9% in India and 3.9% in Germany. The report's methodology deserves credit for what it doesn't claim. Unlisted explicitly states it cannot say whether an employer with a stale posting is still interviewing, nor how long ghost postings persist on aggregators like LinkedIn or Indeed after being removed from the source. Closure times are bounded by the 29-day observation window and flagged as lower bounds throughout. This is measurement discipline that the hiring industry itself rarely exercises. The structural implication is clear: job seekers navigating the current market face a catalog where roughly a quarter to a third of what they see is likely not attached to an active hiring process. This is a tax on worker time and attention — millions of hours spent tailoring applications and preparing for roles that may not exist. For employers, stale postings erode brand credibility. For policymakers, the gap between posted openings and actual hiring intent means labor market tightness indicators built on job-posting counts systematically overstate demand.
