Good to be skeptical. Remember, though, that there is zero cost to displaying ads. That means they get bundled at places like indeed. If you’re HR and have 3 openings, but have 4 ads you can run for less than the price of 3… Personally, I might run an ad for some kind of triple threat that has no chance of finding someone.

Also, the cost of screening ad responses is near zero compared to 30 years ago.

So we have economics that encourages ghost job listings. Personally I’d like to see big taxes on job postings scaling for company size, maybe duration too. Would solve this particular problem.