29,000 Jobs and a Job Board Full of Ghosts

The September jobs report was weak, a big share of the openings you see aren't real, and nobody is enforcing anything. Here's the data, and why more of you are going to have to build your own job.

Back in May I wrote that the job market is fake and that if you've been applying for months with nothing back, it isn't you. Five months later the numbers are worse, and the people posting jobs they never plan to fill are still getting away with it.

Let's start with what the government actually reported on Friday.

The September jobs report

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the economy added 29,000 jobs in September. Economists were expecting somewhere around 84,000. Over the last twelve months the economy has averaged only 45,000 new jobs a month, which is barely enough to keep up with population growth.

It gets worse when you read past the headline:

• July was revised to a loss. The first estimate said July added 21,000 jobs. The revised number is negative 10,000. July and August together were revised down by 60,000 jobs.
• 7.1 million people are unemployed. The unemployment rate is 4.2%.
• 1.9 million of them have been out of work for six months or longer. That's 27.1% of everyone unemployed. More than one in four.
• 4.5 million people are working part-time because they can't find full-time work. They don't count as unemployed, but they aren't doing fine either.

That's University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers. Three months averaging 17,000 jobs. That's close to standing still.

Now look at the openings side. In the government's latest job openings survey, employers reported 7.1 million openings in August. They made 5.2 million hires. That's roughly 1.9 million more openings than hires in a single month. If those jobs are real and employers really want to fill them, where are the hires?

Small businesses tell the same story. For companies with 1 to 9 employees, the openings rate fell from 6.0% in July to 4.3% in August. The businesses that usually hire first are pulling back.

How many job postings are real?

Here's the part nobody in Washington wants to touch: there is no official count of fake job postings. Congress's own research office, the Congressional Research Service, said so plainly in 2025. The government measures openings by asking employers. It doesn't check whether those openings exist.

So the best numbers we have come from private research. They don't all agree, but they all point the same direction:

• Greenhouse, a hiring software company, found that 18% to 22% of jobs posted on its platform in 2024 were never filled and showed no real hiring activity. About 70% of the companies using its platform had posted at least one of these ghost jobs in a single quarter.
• Resume Builder surveyed hiring managers in 2024. 40% said their company had posted a fake job in the past year. Three in ten said they had one up right now. And seven in ten said they considered the practice morally acceptable.
• ResumeUp.AI analyzed LinkedIn listings and estimated 27.4% were likely ghost jobs.

Put those together and a fair reading is that somewhere between one in five and one in four online job postings is not a real, open job. If you've sent out 100 applications, 20 to 25 of them may have gone to a position that never existed.

Why would a company do this? The hiring managers told Resume Builder themselves: to look like they're growing, to collect résumés for later, to make current employees think help is coming, and to make current employees feel replaceable. Read that last one again.

Nobody is enforcing anything

There is no federal law that specifically bans posting a job you don't intend to fill. The Congressional Research Service points out that the Federal Trade Commission has general authority over "unfair or deceptive" business practices, and the FTC has gone after outright job scams. But a real company running a fake listing for months to make its stock look healthy? There's no specific rule against it and no agency actively going after it.

Here's where things actually stand:

• Ontario, Canada already did it. Since January 1, 2026, employers there with 25 or more workers have to say whether a posting is for a real, existing vacancy, and they have to tell interviewed applicants where they stand within 45 days.
• New York passed a ghost job bill through both houses this year. It would require employers with 100 or more workers to disclose when they expect to fill a role, with fines for violations. It has been sitting on Governor Hochul's desk, unsigned.
• New Jersey and Pennsylvania have bills. Pennsylvania's would ban ghost postings outright. Neither is law.
• At the federal level, an advocacy group is pushing a "Truth in Job Advertising and Accountability Act." It is not law.

A country next door figured this out. Here, the companies doing it pay nothing, the people applying pay with months of their lives, and the official numbers get padded with jobs that don't exist.

So build your own job

I'm not going to tell you to stop applying. If you have rent due, apply. But stop treating it as the only path. When roughly one in five postings is fake, hiring is barely moving, and more than a quarter of the unemployed have been out six months or longer, waiting for an employer to pick you is a plan with bad odds.

I know what it feels like to do all the work and have someone else decide what you're worth. Before I started my first company, I was out every day bringing in business. When I brought it in, I had to hand an enormous share of my commission to the company I brought it to. Their reason for the split was that I was getting support from the back end. Nobody supported me. I did it all myself, and I was paying a large part of every commission to a company that was essentially lying to me about what I was getting for it. The people running it didn't want to be bothered. They wanted to collect their checks, and when I complained, nobody listened.

So I opened my own company. My thinking was simple: if I'm going to do all the work myself anyway, I'm going to be in control of it and keep 100% of the commission.

There was a second reason, and it matters even more right now. When you work for someone else, you don't control how long you get to keep your job. There's no loyalty from companies to employees anymore. It doesn't matter how hard you work or how many hours you put in. If the numbers say cut, you're cut. I think a lot of people are coming to that realization right now. The only thing you actually control is what you build for yourself.

Starting something doesn't have to mean quitting everything and taking out a loan. It can start small and on the side:

• Sell what you already know how to do. The skill you were hired for is a service someone will pay for directly. Bookkeeping, repairs, design, cleaning, scheduling, sales.
• Get one paying customer before you spend real money. Not a website, not a logo, not business cards. One person who pays you. That tells you more than any plan.
• Keep your costs close to zero until revenue is steady. A phone, a free email address and word of mouth have started a lot of companies.
• Set it up properly once it's real. A simple LLC, a separate bank account, and someone who knows taxes.

There are plenty of gurus out there selling courses on how to start a business, and a lot of them have never actually run one. I have, more than once. I've built an insurance company and a marketing company, and both are still operating and still doing well. That's what I'll be writing about here: how to actually start and run a company, from someone who has done it.

Nobody can ghost you from a job you own.