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Got ghosted by tech companies so I built a tool to track ghost jobs

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Last year I was looking for a new role. I sent out applications, did the prep, waited. What came back was mostly nothing. Not rejection emails, just silence. The job listings I'd applied to stayed live for weeks. Some for months.As a software engineer, I decided to dig into it properly. I built a system to continuously track job postings across companies, logging posting dates and measuring how long roles stay open before closing or don't. After 35,000+ listings across 200+ companies, some patterns are hard to ignore. Some listings have been open for 700+ days at companies you'd recognize. Others post 90% of their open roles within a single month, a signal that's harder to fake than a press release.I published two initial insight pages based on this work: - Which companies are posting most aggressively right now - Job listings that have been open for over a yearWhat I didn't expect is that the same signals useful for detecting ghost jobs also say something broader about a company's hiring momentum, recruiting intensity, pipeline health, where talent bottlenecks might exist. I'm not sure yet where this leads, but I'll keep expanding the dataset and publishing more insights as I go.Would genuinely love feedback on the methodology, interpretation, or obvious blind spots in the data.

HN · launched May 16, 2026 · 7 upvotes (top 58%) · 0 views

Niche: job search and application trackers · 189 launches, 14 in the last 7 days ▼ -42% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • HR & recruiting
  • Workflow automation
  • B2C
  • Not AI
  • Commercial product

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

Partial While the frontend and database for displaying stale jobs are standard, maintaining reliable scrapers that continuously monitor and deduplicate thousands of ATS postings over years requires robust scraping infrastructure.

What it would actually take: The architecture needs a distributed crawler service (e.g., using Celery/Temporal with headless Playwright instances or direct API scraping of Greenhouse/Lever/Workday endpoints), rotating proxy management, and data deduplication pipelines. The main difficulty is overcoming anti-scraping protections, dynamic ATS client rendering, and continuous data hygiene across hundreds of corporate job boards. A solo builder would need expertise in large-scale web scraping, bot evasion, and long-term data persistence.

Discussion

3 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Shortlist (personal job scanning tool)

Concerns raised: Distinguishing talent shortages from H1B postings, Job description change detection methodology, Data canonicalization approach

Feature requests: Public API for dataset access, Integration capabilities for external datasets

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 380 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #182 of 381 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 198 days after the earliest competitor.

  • Layoffstoday · hn · 2026-01-09 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.56
  • Ghost Job Checker by Unlisted · ph · 2026-09-30 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.55
  • Dreamwork · hn · 2026-05-07 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.52
  • Unlisted Careers · ph · 2026-09-11 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.51
  • Direct Openings · ph · 2026-11-04 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.51
  • hire.run · ph · 2026-09-09 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.50
  • Verdiq · ph · 2026-10-16 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.49
  • JobRadar · ph · 2026-10-31 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.49

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