Is This Job Real? How to Verify Any Posting in 5 Minutes

Is this job real? Yes — you can answer that for almost any posting in about five minutes, and you should do it before you spend 40 minutes tailoring a resume. The method is simple: confirm the job lives on the company's own careers page, check how long it has been up, verify the recruiter is a real person, cross-check any email domain, and look for a salary and a named team. Here's exactly how.

A perfect-looking posting is not proof of a perfect-looking job. Some listings are outright scams. Many more are "ghost jobs" — roles that are posted but not actually being filled. Both waste your time, and one of them can cost you money or your identity. Five minutes of checking saves you from both.

You don't need special tools to do this. You need the posting, a browser, and five minutes. Run these five checks in order. If a posting fails two or more, treat it as a no.

1. Check the Company's Own Careers Page

This is the single most powerful check, so do it first.

Open a new tab, go to the company's real website, and find their careers or jobs page. Search for the exact title you saw on LinkedIn, Indeed, or wherever you found it.

• If the job is there with a matching title and description, that's a strong green flag. Apply through the company site when you can.
• If the job is not there but everything else looks legit, the listing may be stale, scraped, or reposted by a third party. Be cautious.
• If the company has no real website at all, stop. That's a serious red flag.

A genuine employer wants applications flowing through their own system. A posting that exists everywhere except the company's own site deserves suspicion.

2. Check How Long It's Been Posted — and Whether It Keeps Reposting

Most boards show a posted date or "X days ago." Pay attention to it.

30+ days — a listing that has been open over a month with no updates is among the strongest ghost-job signals you can find.

Also watch for the reposting pattern: a job that disappears and reappears every couple of weeks, or that has been "freshly posted" several times for the same role. That cycle often means a company is collecting resumes, keeping a pipeline warm, or advertising a culture of hiring without an actual seat to fill.

Roughly 4 in 10 hiring managers admit to keeping listings up for roles they aren't actively filling, per a Resume Builder survey (2024). So an old or recycled posting isn't paranoia — it's a documented pattern. For the full picture of why this happens, see what is a ghost job.

3. Verify the Recruiter or Contact Is Real on LinkedIn

If a name is attached to the posting — a recruiter, a hiring manager, a "talent partner" — look them up on LinkedIn.

A real person will have:

• A profile with a work history that actually lists the hiring company.
• Mutual connections or a normal-sized network, not a brand-new account.
• A photo and activity that match a working professional.

Warning signs include a profile created weeks ago, a generic stock-style photo, a name that doesn't match the email, or no LinkedIn presence at all for someone claiming to recruit for a large company. A reverse image search on the profile photo takes ten seconds and can expose a stolen or stock image.

4. Cross-Check the Domain of Any Email

If the posting or a follow-up message gives you an email address, look hard at what comes after the "at" symbol.

A legitimate recruiter at Acme Corp emails you from an acme.com address — not a Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, or lookalike domain like acme-careers.net. Scammers love free email accounts and near-miss domains because they're untraceable and quick to spin up.

Quick test: does the email domain exactly match the company's real website domain? If not, ask why. A real company can tell you. A scam will get vague or pushy. This single check stops a large share of job scams before they start.

5. Look for a Salary, a Specific Team, and a Real Hiring Manager

Real jobs have specifics. Ghost jobs and scams trade in vagueness.

A posting worth your time usually includes:

• A salary or salary range (in many places this is now required by law).
• A named team, department, or product the role sits in.
• A described interview process, or at least a real person you'd report to.
• Concrete day-to-day responsibilities, not just buzzwords.

A listing that promises great pay but won't say how much, can't name the team, and skips any mention of interviews is telling you something. Listen.

Run the posting against this at a glance.

If you're seeing mostly the right column, don't apply — close the tab. No single green flag proves a job is real, but a posting that clears all five checks is almost always worth your time.

The manual method works and it's free. But if you're applying to a lot of roles, doing five checks per listing adds up.

That's the gap inteller.ai is built to close. You paste a job description and it scans the text against 30+ fraud and ghost-job patterns — recycled-posting language, vague compensation, scam phrasing, missing company specifics — and flags what's worth a closer look. It's not the only ghost-job detector out there, and it won't replace your own judgment. What it does well is give you a fast first read so you can spend your five minutes on the postings that survive the scan, not the ones that don't. Compare the landscape in our roundup of the best ghost-job detector tools.

You can also do this by hand using our full fake-posting checklist — the scan just gets you there faster.

You're allowed to be skeptical. A posting that's real will pass these checks easily — the company's site confirms it, the recruiter is findable, the email checks out, and the role names a salary and a team. A posting that can't pass is telling you to spend your time elsewhere. Five minutes up front beats forty minutes wasted on a job that was never going to call you back.

Want the fast version? Scan any posting with inteller.ai and get an instant read on fraud and ghost-job patterns before you apply.