Ghost Jobs Are Wasting Your Time — I Built a Chrome Extension to Detect Them
The article discusses the prevalence of ghost jobs, which are job listings that are not actively hiring. A new Chrome extension called GhostJob has been developed to help users identify these listings by analyzing specific signals. The extension uses a scoring model based on posting age, description vagueness, and duplicate postings to determine the likelihood of a job being a ghost job.
- ▪Ghost jobs make up an estimated 20% to 40% of job listings on platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed.
- ▪The GhostJob extension analyzes job postings based on three main signals: posting age, description vagueness, and duplicate postings.
- ▪The scoring model categorizes jobs into three tiers: Likely Real, Caution, and Likely Ghost.
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| Original publisher | DEV.to (Top) |
| Canonical URL | https://dev.to/_350df62777eb55e1/ghost-jobs-are-wasting-your-time-i-built-a-chrome-extension-to-detect-them-1pm6 |
| Publication time | Tue, 19 May 2026 16:51:32 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-19T17:04:57.940Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-19T17:04:57.940Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | f4MS5WmYn_ut |
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| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
try { if(localStorage) { let currentUser = localStorage.getItem('current_user'); if (currentUser) { currentUser = JSON.parse(currentUser); if (currentUser.id === 3680827) { document.getElementById('article-show-container').classList.add('current-user-is-article-author'); } } } } catch (e) { console.error(e); } SHOTA Posted on May 19 Ghost Jobs Are Wasting Your Time — I Built a Chrome Extension to Detect Them #chromeextension #javascript #career #buildinpublic A ghost job is a job listing that exists but isn't actively hiring. The company posted it months ago, probably isn't reviewing applications, and might not even have a live opening. Estimates put ghost job listings at anywhere from 20% to 40% of what you see on LinkedIn and Indeed on any given day.
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