Last year I was looking for a new role. I sent out applications, did the prep, waited. What came back was mostly nothing. Not rejection emails, just silence. The job listings I d applied to stayed live for weeks. Some for months.As a software engineer, I decided to dig into it properly. I built a system to continuously track job postings across companies, logging posting dates and measuring how long roles stay open before closing or don t. After 35,000+ listings across 200+ companies, some patterns are hard to ignore. Some listings have been open for 700+ days at companies you d recognize. Others post 90% of their open roles within a single month, a signal that s harder to fake than a press release.I published two initial insight pages based on this work: - Which companies are posting most aggressively right now - Job listings that have been open for over a yearWhat I didn t expect is that the same signals useful for detecting ghost jobs also say something broader about a company s hiring momentum, recruiting intensity, pipeline health, where talent bottlenecks might exist. I m not sure yet where this leads, but I ll keep expanding the dataset and publishing more insights as I go.Would genuinely love feedback on the methodology, interpretation, or obvious blind spots in the data.