The openings nobody filled

A number the openings count does not carry

Forty-four percent of United States hiring managers say their company currently has open positions it cannot fill, up from 36 percent in the fall of 2025 and the highest level of unfilled job openings since the fall of 2023. The figure comes from the Job Insights survey The Harris Poll ran for Express Employment Professionals, 1,006 hiring decision makers surveyed between May 13 and June 1 and published on August 12.

The harder number is in the same release. More than 1 in 5 open positions, 21 percent on average, are closed without a candidate filling the role. Twenty-seven percent of managers say more than a quarter of their own openings end that way.

The wait got longer, not busier

Forty-three percent say the time it takes their company to hire someone has increased. Twenty-six percent say it now runs at least four weeks once resume reviews, interviews and the final decision are counted.

The number of interviews did not rise with it. Candidates go through an average of four before an offer, down from five when the question was last asked in the spring of 2023. Fewer rounds, longer wait. The delay is in the gaps between the steps rather than in the steps themselves.

Half right, for the wrong reason

The Harris Poll ran a companion survey of 1,000 job seekers for the same company between May 19 and June 8. Nearly a third, 31 percent, name an automated hiring process, rather than being heard by a person, as a challenge in their search. The same share believe companies are claiming to hire while only collecting resumes to review.

Set against the employer data, that suspicion is half right. Most are not staging a search they never meant to finish. They are running a real one that ends with the chair still empty.

This is not a ghost job

A ghost job is a posting for a role the employer is not actively working. What these hiring managers describe is the opposite case, a live requisition, open for weeks, closed with nobody in it.

The survey does not ask why, so the reason stays unmeasured. What reaches the applicant is the same either way. No hire, no notice, no way to tell one from the other.

What the survey cannot say

Both halves are self-reported, and neither audits a single requisition. The 21 percent is an average across surveyed employers, not a national rate, so it cannot be laid over the 7.36 million openings the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted in June. The market around it is thin either way. Payrolls fell by 23,000 in July, with the two prior months revised down a combined 103,000, in the Employment Situation released August 7.

A job seeker cannot control which searches end empty, only how much of a life goes into finding out. CoBlack sources openings from validated employer career pages and ATS feeds, matches them against what a person has demonstrably done, and submits server-side.

Some of those openings were never going to end in a hire. The cost of learning which ones should not fall entirely on the people applying.