Indian tech companies are taking recourse to ghost posts on job portals such as LinkedIn and Teamlease Services to increase their visibility among job seekers.

Ghost posts are job openings posted on job portals even when no vacancies exist.

“We are witnessing a substantial rise in the number of ghost posts,” said Jayashree Sridhar Patil, general manager of research and marketing, at Teamlease Services Limited, an Indian recruitment and human resource services firm.

Companies use ghost posts to explore potential candidate profiles, without hiring them, said Patil. “They are a company’s way of ‘window shopping’, generated by AI.” 

IT companies have the largest number of fake postings, owing to the constant demand for skilled professionals. 

“When a person applies for a job, there is an option ‘Follow company’ to stay up to date with their page’ which gets marked automatically,” said a former employee of an IT company on the condition of anonymity. Applicants do not usually unmark this and if they have to unfollow, they will have to go to the main page, they said.

This assumes significance as India had about 99 million LinkedIn users, the second-largest number, behind the U.S., which had more than 200 million users in 2023, according to a report by the World Population Review.

“If a company posts an application, only the company will know whether it is a ghost post,” said an official from LinkedIn, a business and employment-focused online platform, on the condition of anonymity.

LinkedIn community policies demand original content. “Don’t do things to artificially increase engagement with your content,” says LinkedIn’s content policies. 

Ghost posts lead to a lack of transparency between the employer and the employee which results in a disconnect between the job postings and actual hiring figures, frustrating job seekers, said Patil. “Ghost posts may even lead to a resurgence of offline job consultancies as the credibility of online job portals will be in question.” she said.