The job hunt can be a slog. Confusing job portals, dense competition, and time-consuming application processes all conspire to make job hunting one of the most annoying experiences on the planet. After all the work that goes into an application, 99.9 percent of the time you hear nothing back. It’s enough to make you feel like you’re firing applications into the abyss—as if the jobs you’ve applied to never existed in the first place. Well, according to a recent study, that may actually be the case.

The Wall Street Journal cites internal data from the hiring platform Greenhouse that shows one in five online job postings—or between 18% and 22% of jobs advertised—are either fake or never filled. That data was culled from Greenhouse’s proprietary information, which the company can access because it sells automated software that helps employers fill out job postings.

The “ghost job” phenomenon has been growing for some time—much to the vexation of job-seekers. The Journal story cites the experiences of one unfortunate job-seeker, Serena Dao, who searched for a job for over a year. Dao says that, before landing her current position, she applied to some 260 jobs and frequently wondered whether the positions she was applying to were real or not.

Some onlookers have speculated that the practice of posting such advertisements is actually a corporate strategy designed to make the businesses posting them seem like they’re growing when, in fact, they’re not. Fast Company writes that this practice may help companies “feign active hiring and growth” and helps the “C-suite hit quarterly goals without the negative perception of removing jobs from their career sites.” Another commentator for Forbes notes that ghost jobs can inflate “the true number of jobs in the market and elongates the job search, much to the frustration of many job seekers.”

The plague of such phantom positions has led some platforms to treat job postings in very much the same way that other online content gets treated: as either A) verified or B) potential misinformation. Both Greenhouse and LinkedIn now supply a job verification service, the Journal writes, which allows users to know whether a position is legit or not. “It’s kind of a horror show,” Jon Stross, Greenhouse’s president and co-founder, told the Journal. “The job market has become more soul-crushing than ever.”