Introducing BuzzVet: We Built a Tool to Help You Stop Applying to Ghost Jobs

I've been in media for thirty years. Radio, TV, digital — I've watched the same story play out across every industry shift. The people with access to information about how systems actually work have always had an advantage over the people who don't. That gap isn't always intentional. But it's always real.

The job market in 2025 is one of the starkest versions of that gap I've seen.

The Problem We Kept Hearing About

Workforce analytics firm Revelio Labs tracked job postings against actual hires from 2019 to 2024. In 2019, eight out of ten postings led to a hire. By 2024, four out of ten. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 7.18 million job openings in July 2025 — more than 2.2 million more openings than actual hires in that same period.

A ResumeUp.ai analysis found that 27.4% of LinkedIn job listings in the U.S. are likely ghost jobs — positions companies have no immediate intention of filling. They're posted to build candidate pipelines, signal growth to investors, manage internal dynamics, or because nobody turned them off after the budget froze.

A LiveCareer survey of 918 HR professionals put it plainly: 45% regularly post jobs they don't intend to fill.

So there are somewhere between 1.3 and 1.6 million job listings active in the U.S. right now that are not connected to an active hire. And job seekers are spending three to five hours per application without any way to tell which listings are real.

That's the problem.

What We Saw in the Data

I'll give you a real example without naming the company.

A mid-size financial services firm had fourteen job listings active on LinkedIn in November. In October, they had announced a restructuring that eliminated 8% of their workforce. Twelve of those fourteen listings were holdovers from before the restructuring — never taken down, never updated. Two were real, business-critical roles that survived the freeze.

If you're applying to any of the twelve, you're not applying for a job. You're contributing to a pipeline that may or may not get activated six months from now, while the company gives you no indication that anything is wrong with your application.

That's not malicious in most cases. It's just asymmetric. The company knows which listings are real. You don't.

What BuzzVet Does

BuzzVet is a free tool. Paste any job description — or paste the URL — and BuzzIQ returns a 0–100 score with a plain-English verdict: Likely Real, Proceed Carefully, or Likely Ghost.

The score runs across five signal categories. You don't need to know what they are before you use it — they show up in the breakdown after you submit. That's intentional. We built the tool to give you the answer, not to make you read documentation before you can use it.

It takes about fifteen seconds. No account. No email required. No paywall.

What It Doesn't Do

BuzzVet is not a guarantee. It reads signals — language patterns, structural indicators, publicly available company data — and returns a probability-based verdict. It is not connected to employer systems. It doesn't know what's in an internal hiring committee. It can miss things.

We say this clearly on every result page. The score is a research shortcut, not a crystal ball. A listing that scores 80 can still be a ghost job if the company changed course last week. A listing that scores 40 can still be real if the description is just poorly written.

Use it as the first filter, not the only one.

The Ambassador Connection

We're building It's Buzzing as a platform for local businesses — tools for referrals, customer engagement, reputation, scheduling, and community. BuzzVet sits alongside that because the people navigating the job market are often the same people who refer local businesses, who create content about their communities, and who are looking for ways to earn income while they're between things.

If you're in job-search mode right now and you have a network — on LinkedIn, in Discord, in a Facebook group, in a newsletter — the It's Buzzing Ambassador Program pays you when businesses sign up through your link.

Share BuzzVet with your community. If your community includes small business owners, real estate agents, coaches, or anyone running a local service business, share the platform. You already have the relationships. This is just a way to make them work in more than one direction.

What's Next for BuzzVet

This is version one. The score runs on BuzzIQ's analysis of the job description itself plus company news signals through our research layer. We're building URL scraping for company career pages and LinkedIn next, followed by repost history detection — the ability to flag roles that have appeared multiple times across job boards under different dates.

We're not trying to replace the research you should be doing. We're trying to compress the first step from ten minutes to fifteen seconds so you can spend your energy on applications that are worth it.

Try it here. Tell me what you think.

The Full Series

• What Is a Ghost Job? — the four types and why they exist
• 7 Red Flags a Job Posting Is Not Real — specific warning signs with real-world examples
• The Ghost Job Economy — the structural argument and who's paying the cost
• How to Tell If a Company Is Actually Hiring — seven research steps before you apply

BuzzVet scores are generated by BuzzIQ based on job posting language patterns and publicly available hiring data. Results are for informational purposes and do not guarantee a position's hiring status.

Sources: Revelio Labs workforce analytics · Bureau of Labor Statistics JOLTS report, July 2025 · ResumeUp.ai LinkedIn ghost job analysis · LiveCareer HR professional survey (n=918)