A few days ago, I wrote a post on LinkedIn about fake job postings.

LinkedIn buried it at around 1,700 impressions.

It wasn’t offensive. It wasn’t political. It was just bad for a very profitable business model.

Then CNBC dropped a piece confirming what a lot of us have been saying for years:

An estimated 2.2 million job postings in the U.S. are fake.

Not outdated.

Not “we filled it internally.”

Not “we’re keeping it up just in case.”

Fake. Posted with no real intention of hiring.

This isn’t a glitch. It’s how the system is designed. And it’s time to talk about it somewhere LinkedIn can’t quietly throttle the reach: on my own site.

What a “Fake Job” Really Is

Let’s be clear about definitions.

A fake job posting is any role that’s advertised when:

• There is no real, active need to fill it now, or
• The company has no realistic intention of hiring from that posting.

That covers things like:

• “Pipeline” roles posted to collect résumés for some unknown future date.
• “Evergreen” jobs that stay open whether there’s headcount or not.
• “Compliance” postings where the internal favorite is already chosen.
• Brand-boosting roles meant to signal growth, not actually hire.

For job seekers, the nuance doesn’t matter. The experience is the same:

You apply. You wait. You hear nothing or get strung along, then ghosted.

On paper, the job market looks busy.

On the ground, people are spending months chasing vapor.

How the Incentives Create Fake Jobs

Here’s how we get to millions of fake jobs.

Job platforms don’t just sell one-off postings. They sell:

• Bulk packages: 10, 20, 50, 200 postings.
• Annual contracts.
• Extra fees for visibility and branding.

LinkedIn is part of that. I pay thousands of dollars a year just for one recruiter seat. Multiply that across employers and you’ve got a serious revenue engine.

Now picture a company that prepaid for 200 postings.

Right now, they have 44 real openings.

Those 156 unused slots? They don’t magically disappear. They get filled with:

• “Future opportunity” listings.
• Always-on roles with no urgency to hire.
• Recycled postings for jobs that are already close to being filled.
• Generic “we’re always hiring great people” ads with no plan behind them.

The platform wins either way: more postings, more page views, more engagement, more data to sell back to the market.

The job seeker loses: more noise, more wasted time, more false hope.

The Human Cost: This Isn’t Just Inefficient. It’s Cruel.

I talk to job seekers constantly. The pattern is the same.

They’re:

• Applying to 100+ roles and getting a handful of replies.
• Updating résumés at midnight after kids are asleep.
• Recording video interviews in between school runs.
• Taking PTO from their current job to do multi-round interview loops.

Last week, a VP of Finance told me they went through five rounds of interviews.

Multiple stakeholders. Real time invested. Then complete silence.

No closure – No feedback – Just… Nothing.

Every fake or unserious posting sets off a chain reaction: hours of tailoring resumes, prepping, interviewing, waiting. For nothing.

It’s not just inefficient – It’s cruel.

Fake Jobs Distort the Entire Economy

The damage doesn’t stop with candidates.

The federal government and economists use job-posting data as a proxy for labor demand. More postings supposedly means a strong market.

But if millions of those postings are fake, the signal is garbage.

We end up:

• Overestimating how healthy the job market really is.
• Underestimating how hard it is for qualified people to land roles.
• Making policy based on inflated demand.

That influences everything from workforce programs to political narratives about “nobody wants to work.”

The truth: lots of people want to work!!! They just can’t find real, active opportunities through the noise.

Why Platforms Let It Happen

The platforms are not innocent bystanders.

LinkedIn and other job boards make money from:

• Volume of postings.
• Time spent on the platform.
• Paid visibility and recruiter tools.

If they seriously cracked down on fake or stale jobs:

• Posting volume would drop.
• Engagement would drop.
• Some of those lucrative contracts would shrink.

So instead of “cleaning the pool,” they tolerate a lot of dirty water.

And when someone points out that the water is filthy? Their reach conveniently collapses.

I’m not claiming there’s a manual “kill switch” for certain posts. But it doesn’t take a conspiracy theory to understand that content supporting the revenue model gets rewarded, and content that questions it does not.

The Real Shortage: Not Talent, But Trust

The common narrative is:

• “We can’t find qualified people.”
• “There’s a major skills gap.”
• “People don’t want to work.”
• And the big one recently “AI”

Meanwhile, I see:

• High-caliber professionals in accounting, finance, operations, analytics struggling to land interviews.
• Candidates with excellent credentials sending out hundreds of applications into silence.
• CFOs, VPs of Finance, great Private Equity experience, VC Experience, CROs Top 25 MBAs.
• Senior leaders getting dragged through long processes only to be ghosted at the finish line.

This is not a talent shortage – It’s a trust shortage.

Job seekers don’t trust:

• That postings represent real, funded roles.
• That anyone will read their application.
• That their time will be respected.
• That platforms care about anything beyond engagement metrics.

Once trust is gone, everything becomes harder:

• Candidates check out mentally.
• They stop investing effort into applications and interviews.
• They disengage from platforms that treat them like data points, not people.

What Needs to Change

If we’re serious about fixing this, the responsibility is shared.

Platforms

• Clearly label “pipeline” or “talent pool” roles instead of pretending they’re active openings.
• Automatically expire postings after a reasonable period of inactivity.
• Make it easy for candidates to flag zombie or suspicious listings and actually act on those flags.

If platforms can track what you clicked three weeks ago, they can track whether a job is real or dead.

Employers

• Don’t post roles that aren’t budgeted and approved.
• Close jobs when they’re filled or cancelled.
• Give candidates an answer, especially if they’ve gone through multiple rounds.

If you wouldn’t treat a customer that way, don’t treat a candidate that way.

Policymakers

• Stop treating raw job-posting counts as clean data.
• Push for clearer standards on what qualifies as an “open role.”
• Adjust how we read labor-market demand in a world inflated by phantom listings.

What Job Seekers Can Do Right Now

You can’t fix LinkedIn, but you can change how you play the game.

• Lean on relationships. Warm introductions, referrals, and recruiters with real mandates will beat cold applications almost every time.
• Read between the lines. Vague, generic, always-open postings should be treated as lower probability. Don’t over-invest.
• Treat your search like a sales pipeline. Track where your time goes. If a company won’t communicate, downgrade them and move on.
• Don’t internalize the noise. When millions of fake jobs are inflating the stats, lack of response does not equal lack of value.

The system is polluted. That’s not on you.

LinkedIn Can Bury a Post. It Can’t Bury This.

CNBC validating the fake jobs problem isn’t the real story.

The real story is:

• Who profits from keeping the illusion alive.
• Who loses time, money, and mental health chasing fake opportunities.
• And who gets silenced when they call it out.

Every fake job is a false promise.

Every ghosted candidate is a person who trusted the system one more time and got burned.

They don’t forget. That’s what’s breaking the labor market.

Until platforms value people over page views and employers value candidates’ time the way they value customers’ time, the hiring crisis isn’t going anywhere.

LinkedIn buried this on my feed.

It’s not getting buried on my site.