Got ghosted by tech companies so I built a tool to track ghost jobs
Last year I was looking for a new role. I sent out applications, did the prep, waited. What came back was mostly nothing. Not rejection emails, just silence. The job listings I'd applied to stayed live for weeks. Some for months. As a software engineer, I decided to dig into it properly. I built a system to continuously track job postings across companies, logging posting dates and measuring how long roles stay open before closing or don't. After 35,000+ listings across 200+ companies, some patterns are hard to ignore. Some listings have been open for 700+ days at companies you'd recognize.…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
Last year I was looking for a new role. I sent out applications, did the prep, waited. What came back was mostly nothing. Not rejection emails, just silence. The job listings I'd applied to stayed live for weeks. Some for months. As a software engineer, I decided to dig into it properly. I built a system to continuously track job postings across companies, logging posting dates and measuring how long roles stay open before closing or don't. After 35,000+ listings across 200+ companies, some patterns are hard to ignore. Some listings have been open for 700+ days at companies you'd recognize. Others post 90% of their open roles within a single month, a signal that's harder to fake than a press release. I published two initial insight pages based on this work: - Which companies are posting most aggressively right now - Job listings that have been open for over a year What I didn't expect is that the same signals useful for detecting ghost jobs also say something broader about a company's hiring momentum, recruiting intensity, pipeline health, where talent bottlenecks might exist. I'm not sure yet where this leads, but I'll keep expanding the dataset and publishing more insights as I go. Would genuinely love feedback on the methodology, interpretation, or obvious blind spots in the data.
Does the same job
all alternatives →- IBI built didtheyghost.me, open-source tool for your next job search2025 · didtheyghost.me · ▲66
(not sure why my previous post didn't appear on Show HN even though I included it in the title, mods please remove if not allowed) Ever applied for a job and never heard back? Many companies just go silent instead of sending rejection emails, leaving you guessing whether to keep waiting or move on. I faced this frustration during my own internship search, especially when there was no real point of contact (automated replies don't count, lol). So, I built didtheyghost.me, a simple open-source tool that crowdsources job application responses. This isn't a job scraper or another job board. It's…
- GLGot laid off. Got sick of ghost jobs. Built something2025 · app.ghostjobs.io · ▲20
Hello everyone, I got laid off last year and during the job hunt, I kept running into ghost jobs, these listings that never lead anywhere. Super frustrating. After some point, I started tracking company behavior across job boards. It snowballed into a little web app where you can actually see how companies are hiring — or pretending to. It's free, early stage, UI is a bit rough, but here’s what some info it shows per company: -Job boards they post on -ATS system they use -Median salary by role -Post frequency + how old the listings are -Skills and degree requirements -Track all existing…
- TFTool for discovering unadvertised job opportunities2025 · ▲6
Searching for job roles in tech? I've been there. For six months, I was stuck in the LinkedIn job application loop, getting nowhere. It was soul-crushing. I started to wonder if I was just a bad developer. But I changed my modus operandi and started reaching out to founders building super cool startups that got recently funded but didnt have the chance to post online yet that they are hiring, the response rate was much more significant and I wwas having super cool convos! This approach was so effective, I turned it into a product. I've tapped into premium data sources (we're talking $25K+…
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