Ghost jobs in remote tech: how many "open roles" are reposts of themselves

What we mean by "repost"

A repost cluster is a set of listings sharing both an employer and a normalised role title within the same corpus snapshot. We strip parenthetical scope hints like "(Remote)" and "(EU only)" before grouping, because those vary across boards but describe the same role.

Reposting is not necessarily deceptive. Some legitimate reasons a single role appears multiple times: a company has separate req IDs per region; an ATS export creates duplicate entries; the role was filled and reopened. We report the data; we don't issue verdicts.

What the data does show is how often a remote job-seeker is asked to evaluate the same opportunity twice. For someone applying to twenty roles a week, that's hours of duplicated effort.

Tiers

• Duplicate — same role appears 2 times. Often legitimate.
• Persistent — 3 to 4 times. Usually means the listing is being kept fresh on a board.
• Chronic — 5+ times. The role has been a fixture; either an exceptionally hard hire, an "always-hiring" funnel, or a stale listing nobody owns. We can't tell which from the data alone.

Reproduce the analysis

The data behind this page is a single public endpoint:

# Top 20 clusters across the whole corpus
curl -s 'https://remnavi.com/repost_clusters.php?top=20' | jq

# Filter to a single employer
curl -s 'https://remnavi.com/repost_clusters.php?company=Acme&top=10' | jq

# Compare against the live raw corpus
curl -s 'https://remnavi.com/jobs_api.php?limit=1' | jq '.total'

The endpoint is open, uncached for journalist use (10-minute CDN at most), and CORS-enabled. If you want a structured dataset, we publish the underlying corpus daily — see About RemNavi for the API docs.

What this complements

Two related pieces in the same auditor series:

• Hybrid Transparency Score — how many "remote" listings are actually hybrid in disguise.
• The Real Remote Score — the five-pillar rubric we apply to every listing.