Justin Marcus is a professional recruiter and the CEO and co-founder of the accounting and financial recruitment platform Big 4 Talent. When it comes to hiring and recruiting, he’s seen it all. “When I started with a Fortune 500 recruitment company, which I won’t name, there were people there that encouraged posting positions that were not totally real,” Marcus told Observer. With more than ten years of experience in the field, he said ghost jobs and spam jobs, or jobs that don’t actually exist, have increased. He was particularly surprised when his wife recently got recruited for a ghost job as a graphic designer. Someone posing as a recruiter had reached out about a fully remote position with a company based in Utah. They did two rounds of phone interviews with her and offered her the job. When she accepted, the recruiter then asked for her to fill out a W9, to get started. But the strange construction of the email address the request came from tipped her off. She reached out to the real company and confirmed with HR that they did not actually have that position open. When she went back to the fake recruiter to find out more, the scammer disappeared.

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Ghost jobs and spam jobs are not a new phenomenon, but there’s evidence that they are on the rise. One widely cited survey from 2022 revealed that 68 percent of employers had listings that were active for more than 30 days, and 10 percent of those listings were up for six........

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