Seems perfectly plausible that the phenomenon of ghost jobs is real and it may be getting worse.

But this SF Gate piece is dumb. The article has one source for its data points and the author does nothing to investigate or challenge the quality of that data. This is not journalism. It looks like a PR piece for resume builder.

The Forbes article you linked is much more informative.

Unless I misunderstand you, you're citing a completely irrelevant factoid. Employment statistics are based on actual people working, not job ads posted. And the revisions [1] (which sometimes are upward) have nothing to do with ghost jobs, but are due to additional data coming in over time, leading to refinements of the original estimate[2].

[1] https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm [2] https://thedispatch.com/article/jobs-report-revisions-explai...

My implications are that companies are either lying and being readjusted from later audits, or government is choosing not to take data into account until later, where impact is lessened. It's not a "ghost job" in the modern meaning, but it does seem to be pretending there are a lot more jobs than in reality.