A hiring platform revealed that one in five job listings is fake or not filled by job posters, per a Wall Street Journal report. 

“It’s kind of a horror show,” hiring platform Greenhouse’s CEO Jon Stross told The Journal in an article posted Sunday. “The job market has become more soul-crushing than ever.”

These fake or unfilled positions, sometimes called “ghost jobs,” have made an already difficult job market nightmarish for some job searchers, including Serena Dao. 

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Dao told The Journal that even after sending over 260 applications, she achieved five final round interviews with no offer. The experience led her to question how many job listings were actually real — and how many were ghost jobs.

Dao said that she was able to find a job thanks to networking and not online hiring platforms. 

“People want a candidate that is at 120%, not even 100%,” Dao told The Journal. “I’m really happy and lucky to be there.”

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Senior career coach with Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management, Glen Loveland, told the outlet that human to human networking is increasingly critical in the modern hiring market.  (Photographer: Angus Mordant/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)

Senior career coach with Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management, Glen Loveland, told the outlet that human-to-human networking is increasingly critical in the modern hiring market. 

“Authentic relationships are the bedrock of sustainable success,” Loveland said. “The days of simply uploading résumés to job boards and hoping for the best are rapidly fading.” 

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But for candidates who still want or need to utilize online job application sites like LinkedIn or Indeed, the danger of applying for a ghost job is still real. Some experts advise job searchers to speak directly to a recruiter to learn if a posting is real or not.

“Talking to someone at the company can help you find out how serious they are,” head of Kickresume, Peter Duris, told The Journal. 

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The job market in general is growing faster than expected, according to government sources. 

The Labor Department on Friday reported that employers added 256,000 jobs in December, well above the estimate from LSEG economists.