When a Third of Job Postings Are Fake, Your Real Opening Pays the Price
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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton opened an investigation into LinkedIn on Tuesday over ghost jobs, listings that either don’t match a real opening or get posted when the employer has no intention of filling the role. His office is chasing the money angle: whether LinkedIn profited off Premium subscribers by marketing itself as a trusted place to find work while its results quietly include jobs that don’t exist.
Paxton’s office says LinkedIn “took advantage” of subscribers and “profited illegitimately” by “marketing itself as a trusted platform for finding employment.” The quote comes straight from the press release, word for word, and it’s the claim Texas now has to prove. The office cites independent studies putting ghost jobs at somewhere between a fifth and a third of all online listings.
A LinkedIn Premium Career or Premium Business subscription costs $39.99 to $69.99 a month. Paxton’s office says that marketing never discloses that some of what a subscriber pays to access might not be real. The office also says LinkedIn doesn’t independently verify most of the postings on its platform, and neither do most of the major job boards. Every platform in this space should be watching that detail closely, not just LinkedIn.
Texas issued a civil investigative demand: a request for documents, data, and internal communications tied to LinkedIn’s advertising and verification practices. Microsoft, which owns LinkedIn, operates the largest online job advertising business in the world, and it hadn’t responded to a request for comment as of this writing. A civil investigative demand is the fact-finding stage. No lawsuit has been filed, and no court or agency has ruled that LinkedIn did anything wrong.
I’ve said for a while that ghost jobs are one of the most corrosive things in hiring right now, so I’m glad someone with subpoena power is finally looking. Every stale or fake listing teaches a job seeker that applying is pointless, and that kind of learned helplessness spreads fast. When a fifth to a third of what people are applying to might not be a live role, you can’t blame candidates for assuming the whole system is rigged against them.
The verification gap is what should worry every platform in this space, not just LinkedIn. The entire online job board model depends on volume: more listings, more clicks, more Premium upgrades from anxious job seekers convinced that a paid account gets them closer to a job that might not even exist. New York passed its own law targeting fake postings back in June, requiring companies with 100 or more employees to disclose whether a listing is a real, current vacancy. Texas going after the largest platform in the industry signals where more states are likely headed next.
Proving “no intention to fill” will be hard. Roles get frozen, backfilled internally, or held open to build a pipeline for reasons that have nothing to do with fraud. My read is that this case matters less for what happens to LinkedIn specifically and more for whether it pushes verification standards onto job advertising as a category. If postings have to tie to a real, open role before they go live, every honest employer and every real recruiter benefits, because their openings stop competing against jobs that were never real to begin with.
Working with a staffing partner instead of posting cold into a board makes that same case in practice. Every role 4 Corner Resources sends a candidate for has an open requisition behind it, confirmed with the hiring manager before anyone applies. If you’re a job seeker tired of guessing which listings are worth your time, see what we currently have open.
Staffing your team doesn’t have to be hard.
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Skilled Trades Are Getting Double-Digit Raises, But Most Desks Aren’t
Payscale’s Q2 2026 Labor Market & Wage Trend Report, published today, puts a hard number on something a lot of workers have been feeling all year. Average wage growth hit 3.5% in the quarter, matching government inflation data exactly. A raise sized exactly to inflation buys nothing extra. Most of the workforce is stuck on a wage treadmill right now, going nowhere while costs rise beside them.
Payscale draws this from its Peer dataset: HRIS records covering more than 10.2 million employees across upwards of 4,500 organizations, refreshed daily. Payscale sells compensation benchmarking software built on that same dataset, so the report also promotes its own product line. The wage figures still track with independent inflation data, so the caveat here is about sourcing, not accuracy: treat this as a detailed picture of Payscale’s own customer base, not a random sample of the whole economy.
Underneath that flat 3.5% average, a specific tier of workers is doing very well. Ironworker Foreman tops Payscale’s wage-growth list at 18%, with a $95,700 median. Equipment Maintenance Technician ties it at 18%, with a $100,000 median. Logistics and Supply Chain Supervisor comes in third at 15%, with a $104,000 median.
Demand tells the same story from another angle. The fastest-growing job categories by job pricings are almost entirely front-line work: Kitchen Assistant postings are up 451%, Bus Driver postings up 278%. The one knowledge-work role to crack Payscale’s top 10 emerging list is Artificial Intelligence Analyst, up 90% with a $118,000 median, a sign that specialized AI expertise is pulling away from the broader white-collar pack even as general office pay stalls.
By industry, Technology led with 6.9% wage growth, more than double what most industries posted. Las Vegas led all metro areas at 4.7%.
Ruth Thomas, Payscale’s chief compensation strategist, framed the pattern as restructuring rather than destruction: “AI is accelerating labor market bifurcation, with employers paying a skills premium for trades and operational roles, while purchasing power erodes for nearly everyone else. A narrow band of AI-specialized knowledge work is pulling ahead.” She called the combined effect of AI, wage compression, and workforce exits “a structural reshaping instead of a disruption.”
Her framing lines up with what I’ve watched building all year. The AI jobs debate keeps assuming one labor market is getting smaller, when Payscale’s data says the market is splitting instead: shrinking for one group, tightening hard for another. The scarcity in skilled trades has been building for years, and this report shows employers are finally paying for it in the wage line instead of just naming it in a survey.
The practical read for anyone setting comp this year is plain. A single blended average hides more than it reveals. The market just paid 18% more for a maintenance tech and close to nothing, after inflation, for a lot of office roles. Price to the specific job and its actual scarcity, not to a company-wide average, or the roles hardest to backfill will be the first ones you lose.
