How to Tell If a Job Posting Is Real: What Each Tool Actually Checks
How to tell if a job posting is real
None of the major job search tools tells you whether an individual listing is real. What they offer instead falls into three groups: filtering by where a listing came from, verifying who posted it, or nothing at all. Here is what each one actually does, checked against each product on 21 September 2026.
| Scores each listing | Shows listing age | Flags reposts | Merges duplicates across boards | Sells to employers | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| JobIntel | Yes, on six signals | Yes | Yes, as a scoring signal | Yes | No |
| Teal | No. Filters by source system | Yes | No | Not claimed | No employer product found |
| Jobscan | No | Not stated | No | Not claimed | Sells to career-services organizations |
| Huntr | No | No job board | No | No job board | Employer portal, through partner institutions |
| Simplify | No | Could not confirm | No | Not claimed | Yes, a recruiting platform |
| No. Verifies the poster, not the role | Yes | Shows a reposted label | No, single board | Yes, Talent Solutions |
The problem is documented by the tools themselves
Huntr, an application tracker, surveyed job seekers in spring 2026. Of 559 respondents, 520 said they had applied to a posting they believed was fake or never meant to be filled. Exposure climbed with volume: 23% among people who had sent one to ten applications, 42% among those who had sent twenty-six to fifty.
Read that figure carefully, because it is about belief rather than incidence. Nothing in the survey verifies that any particular posting was fake. It measures what job seekers suspect, and suspicion and truth are not the same number. The honest version is that most people applying at volume now assume some of it is wasted, and they are largely unable to tell which part.
Estimates of how many listings are actually ghost jobs land between 18% and 27%, across separate studies from Greenhouse, ResumeBuilder and Clarify Capital.
What is notable is that Huntr published the problem and ships nothing against it.
What Teal actually does
Teal markets a filter that eliminates ghost jobs. That claim lives on its social accounts; on Teal's homepage and job board, the words ghost, fake, scam, duplicate and repost do not appear at all.
The feature behind it is real and worth understanding. Teal's ATS Platform filter restricts results to jobs posted through applicant tracking systems such as Greenhouse, Lever and Workday, on the reasoning that a requisition sitting in a company's own hiring system is likelier to be a real opening than a scraped copy of one. Teal says it can cut a result set from 150 jobs to 35.
That is a source filter, not detection. It asks where a listing came from, not whether this listing is worth your time. A posting can sit in Workday and still be a pipeline-building exercise, a role already promised internally, or a requisition left open for months. The filter cannot see any of that, because nothing about the source says it.
Teal does show how old a listing is, on the card, with a date-posted filter. That is genuinely useful and most job boards do not do it.
What the others do
Jobscan claims nothing here, and it is worth being plain about that rather than implying evasion. Jobscan optimizes a résumé against an applicant tracking system, and it is the strongest product in the category at that job. The only mention of fake postings anywhere on its site is a blog warning about auto-apply tools, which is advice, not a feature.
Simplify claims nothing about fake postings either. Its job is autofilling applications and matching you to roles, and its browser extension does that well. Simplify also sells an agentic recruiting platform to employers, which is worth knowing when you are weighing whose interests a product serves.
Huntr is an application tracker with no job board for seekers, so listing age and duplicates do not arise. Its B2B line sells to bootcamps, universities and outplacement firms, and includes an employer portal through those partners.
What LinkedIn verifies, and what it does not
LinkedIn is where most people will look first, so it deserves a straight answer. Its verification checks identity: that the company page is genuine and that the person who posted the job actually works there. That is worth having, and it is still being rolled out.
It says nothing about whether the role exists, whether it is already filled, or whether anyone intends to hire. A verified recruiter at a verified company can post a requisition that will never be filled, and every badge on the listing will be accurate.
LinkedIn does show listing age and marks a job as reposted, which is more than most boards give you.
A scam checker is not a ghost-job checker
Search for a fake job posting checker and you will find several: jobscamscore.com, verifyjobs.org, verijob.app, jobmeter.app. They do a real job, and it is a different job. You paste in one listing and they tell you whether it looks like a scam: a fake recruiter, an advance-fee trick, an attempt to harvest your identity documents.
That is a one-off safety check, and it is the right tool when something feels wrong about a specific message. It is not a way to work through forty listings a week, and it does not address a real company posting a real-looking role it has no intention of filling. Scams and ghost jobs are two different problems that share a search box.
The narrower question, whether a posting is a ghost job, has almost no tooling at all. The largest dedicated browser extension for it had 63 users when I checked.
What JobIntel does instead
JobIntel scores credibility on six signals: posting age, repost frequency, salary transparency, description specificity, whether the role appears on the company's own careers page, and source reputation.
None of those signals proves a posting is fake. Together they separate a listing that behaves like a real opening from one that behaves like a placeholder. A role that has been reposted four times, carries no salary, describes the job in generic language and does not appear on the employer's own careers page is not proof of anything, and it is a different proposition from a two-day-old listing with a salary band that matches a live careers-page requisition.
The same engine merges the same job across boards into one listing while keeping every source, so a role posted to six places is one decision rather than six.
I do not sell anything to employers. There is no recruiter product, no job-posting product and no employer side of this business, which means there is nothing on the other side of the marketplace for your attention to be sold to. Among the tools on this page, that is true of Teal and Jobscan in the consumer sense, partly true of Huntr, and not true of Simplify.
Who this is not for
If what you need is a better résumé, use Jobscan. If you want the fastest application autofill, use Simplify. If you apply to a handful of carefully chosen roles a month and already read every careers page yourself, credibility scoring will tell you little you have not already worked out.
This is built for the case where volume is the problem: dozens of listings a week across several boards, most of which look identical from the outside, and no way to tell which ones are worth an hour of tailoring.
What to check yourself, with no tool at all
- Find the role on the company's own careers page. If it is not there, ask why it is on a job board.
- Check the posting date, then check whether the same role appeared a month ago under a different listing.
- Treat a missing salary band as information, especially in a jurisdiction that requires one.
- Read the description for specifics. A real requisition names a team, a manager, a product or a problem. A placeholder names a personality.
- Never send money, bank details or identity documents to a recruiter. That is a scam rather than a ghost job, and it is a different problem with a harder edge.
Last checked 21 September 2026. Competitor claims were read from each company's own site on that date, and products change.
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